[jasonkester]

The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time.

As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month. They are guaranteed to lose money on him, and the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become.

This is the reason you have a "refund" button on the customer page of your admin console. A quick email apologizing for not being able to meet the needs of his unique setup and a refund of his payment, as soon as it became apparent just how impossible things were about to become would have solved this completely.

Or at least one hopes so. The tough thing about dealing with toxic customers is that they grow on you slowly and you don't notice at first. Then one day you realize you've spent four hours just digging into issues and writing emails to this one person who you're probably going to have refund eventually anyway.

I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.

[dangrossman]

Jason, what's up with this comment?

Where did you find this 'complex edge case of a system' in his post? This 'unique setup'?

Why do you think 'impossible things were about to become' when he was able to easily move the sites to WP Engine... after paying a 3rd party to do it?

He didn't describe a single special requirement that I can see. Just plain old WordPress with some existing data to move. Not even a large network or a large amount of traffic. This is supposed to be WP Engine's bread-and-butter customer.

All of WP Engine's plans other than "Personal" say "Hey WordPress MultiSite customer, come here! This plan is for you! Hundreds of thousands of visits a month and 20GB+ of storage!" http://wpengine.com/pricing/

Why are you calling him a 'toxic customer'? He's been running this WordPress install himself on an unmanaged VPS. He wasn't wasting their support staff's time on unnecessary questions -- they were wasting his! That's not a 'toxic customer', that's a 'toxic business'.

I'm having a hard time connecting this comment to the HN submission at all.

[kordless]

He also didn't describe much of any of his technical requirements. I'd say it's a fair assumption his setup was enough different to cause an issue. Whether or not that's a fireable offense is up to the company.

[techtalsky]

He did, however describe the eventual problem: his comments table was larger than what Wordpress's out-of-the-box feature (Recent Comments) was able to sort. He had very overpowered hardware in his custom situation. It strikes me that this was an extroardinary but still within band problem that WPEngine should have eaten the cost for solving OR tell him MUCH more swiftly they couldn't.

[jacques_chester]

The eventual problem was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

The weeks of shitty service beforehand are what really did it.

[jacques_chester]

It's a bog ordinary Wordpress multisite installation. The most exotic thing about it was WP-supercache and WPEngine have clever inbuilt logic to safely disable that when you migrate across.

[trevelyan]

I'm more curious what VPS package you had powering your stuff at Linode and how much you were spending on it each month? Reason being that 250 USD buys a LOT of server these days and it is surprising you ended up with underpowered hardware if your VPS wasn't giving you any problems.

If you're looking to upgrade in the future, you might be much better off throwing a dedicated server at the problem and setting a nightly backup to S3. Also, thank you for posting.

[jacques_chester]

I use 2 512Mb Linodes. One for nginx/PHP, one for MySQL. Putting these on different servers is by far the biggest leap in performance I ever got.

Monthly cost is about $40 ... unless you count my time.

[wyck]

Do you not read the part about him having over 400k comments? Don't you think that is a bit outside the regular scope?

[dangrossman]

I don't think that was in the post originally. Either way, it's not outside scope, it's not a big deal, and it's not an excuse for weeks of failing to provide support. They didn't fail to even move the site because of the number of comments. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, commented himself that they host many blogs with far more comments than that without issue.

[ryanwaggoner]

I think that's unfair. So if you sign up for a premium service because they say they can help you solve problem X, and then you follow their exact instructions to no avail and get the runaround from customer support, you're a toxic customer?

I don't know what your experience with WPEngine is, but suffice it to say, this post is not the first complaint I've heard, and I've personally had...issues with them as well. And my setup is even more vanilla than the one described in the linked post (which is pretty vanilla, honestly). I love Jason Cohen's contribution to the startup community and I want to love WPEngine, but I am starting to wonder if something is amiss on the technical / customer service side there.

[jacques_chester]

Multisite networks are not an edge case.

It is part of the mainline code for Wordpress. It is present in the base installation.

WPEngine specifically advertise that they support it.

Also ... since when did we start considering people who expect to get what they were promised by the sales copy to be "toxic customers"?

[benatkin]

ZippyKid wins. Hosts of open source software don't have to support every feature, and the right way to omit a feature is to say that it isn't supported in the documentation.

[spindritf]

> the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become

Then just tell him that the service isn't for him at that price, like Page.ly did.

[unreal37]

Pagely tried to help him. Tried really hard. WPEngine didn't even try - their cust support people just read from the same script over and over. And then charged him $500 for support.

If they can't support customers like him, they shouldn't charge him $500 for the time it takes to determine that.

[jacques_chester]

Just to be absolutely clear on the facts here:

WPEngine are not billing me the $500. WebSiteMovers are.

I approved that work and I will pay that bill, just as soon as they help me out with some technical details. WSM are not in the wrong here.

However I do intend to present an invoice to WPEngine for the amount that I have paid to WSM.