Now Powered by WP Engine!
If you’re reading this, it means you’re now seeing my site being hosted by WP Engine! It’s a move I’ve been meaning to make for a while now (especially since meeting all of you fantastic people at WordCamp Phoenix) and this weekend seemed like a good time to do it. So why did I move from Dreamhost and why did I choose WP Engine? Good questions!
It actually started in 2012; Dreamhost had a really bad, day long outage. I was upset after that because we didn’t get a whole lot in terms of a we’re sorry. I kinda just got a, “this is what happened.” I’ll tell you if it were my business, I would have given everyone who was affected a free month of hosting, because I’m willing to bet that day-long downtime probably cost a lot of people more than that. Still, I decided to stick with them because I liked their customer service and they were well priced.
Without going into a whole saga, that changed. I experienced more downtime over the course of the next two years, including another outage that lasted an entire afternoon very recently. I also get VPS Stability alerts daily and my sites don’t get all the much traffic. Even so, when I ask Dreamhost how I can fix it, the only answer I get consistently is, “buy more RAM” or “It looks like you’re running WordPress. It’s likely that.”
So Why WP Engine?
I got on WP Engine after I won free hosting for life (so awesome, right?) and instantly loved it. They take all the worrying about WordPress out of hosting. The handle backups, and cacheing, spinning up new installs, security, and more. On top of that, they make it super easy to set up a staging site that you can move to production AND integrate git right into their admin panel. It’s seriously everything I need for my workflow. Also, they have some of the coolest, passionate people working from them.
Further, I added a new site to my account on Friday, and they emailed me a welcome message that included this super-useful tutorial on migrating to them. The steps were laid out for me and they were a lot easier than I thought; I had no reason not to make the switch.
The Process
Honestly, the above blog post got me 98% of the way there. The only problem is that I’m hosting a bunch of subdomains and email with Dreamhost and I’m not ready to make the move yet (and as far as I can tell, WP Engine doesn’t do email hosting).
All I had to do was switch my main domain (casabonaorg-staging.eowgdit8-liquidwebsites.com) and only my main domain from “Fully Hosted” to “DNS Only.” Then I changed the A Record for casabonaorg-staging.eowgdit8-liquidwebsites.com and www to the IP address that WP Engine supplied for me. My website saw a few hours of downtime because of long TTLs (I should have done it over night), but my email, subdomains, and even FTP saw no downtime whatsoever.
So what are you waiting for? If you work with WordPress regularly, you should at least give them a try. Their plans might be a little more expensive than your run of the mill hosting, but they are much more than “run of the mill” and the price pales in comparison to the amount of time they will save you. Check them out today. I promise you’ll love them.
Full Disclosure: The links are affiliate links. That shouldn’t change anything though. I think hands down, WP Engine is the best hosting from WordPress developers.