[tedchs]

As my two cents, although I am a Linux engineer, I don't want to manage a Web cluster just for Wordpress, so I use WPEngine in production for about 10 sites and it has worked very well and support has been sufficiently responsive.

Reading about this, I get concerned when people conflate "performance" and "scalability". Performance is about time-based metrics such a requests-per-second. Scalability is about the question of whether I can add more hardware proportionately to my request load and continue to perform. WPEngine's marketing claims are about scalability, not performance.

This guy's WPEngine code was apparently doing a 189k row sort when serving certain requests, which is not going to perform well on any hosting platform, including DIY.