[aranjedeath]

The major issue I've had with wp is the speed. I don't know if it's a php problem or a wp problem, but running wp on shit-tier commodity hardware results in a complete inability for your site to be {hn'd/slashdotted/dugg/whatever} due to the ~500ms page generation times (that only increase with any plugins at all). The caching plugins mostly resolve this, but still not well enough to be accessible during a wave of pageviews.

It seems like unless you're willing to pay for managed wp hosting (or fancy hardware), you can't expect more than 10 pageviews/s to be handled. This makes me sad.

[ohashi]

You can up the performance pretty significantly with caching at various levels. My experience was the plugins don't do as much as something like putting nginx in front. http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/08/29/reverse-proxy-and-ca... what I put in front of it, handles reddit/hn/digg whatever just fine as far as I can tell.

Caching somewhere above WordPress seems to do wonders, things like Memcache, Varnish, etc.

Also, some of the companies I was comparing are charging <$10/month and outperforming some of the bigger brand names like WPEngine (SiteGround and GoDaddy for instance). I suspect if they gain traction with their products, they could push the price down on entry level managed wordpress hosting.