| Worth interjecting a counterpoint here, I think. I've been running a site about the same size as the OP's (500k-ish visitors a month) with WPEngine for nearly a year now, and so far I'm very impressed. It's smoother and faster than it was before, we've only had one outage of more than an hour (and they responded by crediting me with a full month's hosting!), and I've found their support to be absolutely top-notch. I wrote a review of their service after a month - which I don't think I ever submitted to HN, d'oh - and all the points I make in it still stand: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... . My key point there, which I stand by, was that moving to WPEngine saved me money over an apparently cheaper self-hosted solution, because I no longer had to spend 2-3 days a month faffing around with server problems. (I believe Patio11 had a similar experience.) (Note - there's an affiliate link in there, because I find that with money I can buy goods and services, but I added that after writing the review.) Just recently I've had an extremely helpful dialog with one of their support engineers which ended up troubleshooting a problem I didn't even know my blog had - which subsequently boosted my available ad inventory by about 25%. Overall, WPEngine aren't perfect - and I'm still checking out other options from time to time - but I've found their support and general solid hosting more than worth the admittedly pretty significant cost. |