Everyman IT

Last week I migrated Everyman IT over to WP Engine to host our site.  EverymanIT.com runs off of WordPress, and WP Engine is a dedicated hosting solution for WordPress sites.

The reason I decided to pay $50 per month to host the site with WP Engine is that I need the site to up 24/7 with as little intervention from me as possible.  WP Engine runs their systems on the Amazon Web Services System so they have solid infrastructure, plus they run routine backups of your site so that if you do something dumb you can go back and fix it.

When you create your account they give you a fresh WordPress install with a number of plugins that they recommend.  Beyond this you get an FTP account and can upload your own plugins and themes.  You do not get direct access to PHPMYADMIN for MySQL administration, but they do give you a great plugin that allows you to use PHPMYADMIN through the WordPress Admin interface.

All in all it was a relatively good process.  Although they recommend Plugins you should use, you can upload your own.  You get full FTP access to your files and folders so if you’re like me you can hack the underling WordPress code if you are so inclined.  I had EverymanIT.com migrated in a few minutes.  Really the thing that took the longest was the DNS change and replication.

My main gripes that I ran into, and you have to be VERY careful of, is that they do not give you any kind of Control Panel outside of the WordPress Admin screen.  Now if you have ever migrated a WordPress site you’ll know that it can be finicky as hell with the WordPress domain name and links.  It gets hard to explain, but basically after I imported EverymanIT.com’s database over to WP Engine I could no longer log into my WP Engine site.  The reason was that I would go to the login screen at http://everymanit.wpengine.com/wp-admin , but then it would try to send the credentials to, and redirect me to, www.EverymanIT.com which was on the server I was trying to migrate from.

This is a simple fix IF you can access the MySQL WordPress OPTIONS table using PHPMYADMIN, but since you can only access PHPMYADMIN from within the WordPress Dashboard with WP Engine everything goes to hell real quick. This was my only problem but it was a BIG one and could send a novice WordPress admin into a fit of hysterics.  I was able to solve the issue by switching the DNS to point to their servers immediately and the site was running fine after about 15 minutes.  BUT it did leave a little bit of a bad taste to have to push forward the migration so quickly.

Also in order to access your FTP account you have to use SFTP.  I use Filezilla normally, but it was giving me a fit trying to connect securely to their SFTP server.  I finally had to use WinSCP which you can download for free from here http://winscp.net/eng/index.php , and followed their instructions.

All in all WP Engine has been running well for a week.  Now that I’m using their services I’ll probably stay with them for the foreseeable future.  As I always try to remind you guys, when you are determining what you are willing to pay for a solution always include the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).  $50 per month for a site may seem expensive, but I don’t have to worry about maintenance, backups, server hacking and such.

I do believe that their overall system needs to be streamlined and made to be more user friendly, but if you have a decent knowledge of Web Server Administration WP Engine may be a good option for you.

You can find them at: http://wpengine.com/