[druiid]

This story and comments have been flogged to death a bit already, but I do have a couple questions/concerns here.

While perhaps the issue ended up mostly being due to a Wordpress core issue, I question why this was an issue for a service that someone is expected to pay $250/month for?

The OP was able to, without a team of engineers/admins get the same content running on a VPS with no issue. I then question exactly what one gets when they pay $250/month for this service? To expect to get any sort of scaling capability out of a $8-$30/month shared hosting account is asinine and anyone running more than a small amount of traffic under such circumstances deserves what they get.

Why then if the end service was not capable of sustaining traffic/memory to the same degree that some shared providers are willing to go, would one pay $250/month? I think this is a question the creators of WP Engine genuinely need to answer...

[STRML]

This is absolutely on the mark. It is well understood that scaling Wordpress correctly requires a couple of core hacks (see this excellent comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693924). Why WPEngine does not incorporate these core hacks is beyond me.

[scribu]

That's a very good question.