Announcing WP Engine!
Written by wpengine on July 25, 2010
We are extremely pleased to announce WP Engine, our premium WordPress hosting platform! Check back on Thursday, July 29th for our invite form to go live.
As WordPress power users, we’ve always wondered why it’s so hard to find a host run by WordPress experts. After countless hours of searching, we realized there was, in fact, no one doing this.
So, we decided to embrace our inner entrepreneur and start a company to scratch our own itch.
WP Engine was born less than 3 months ago and we’ve been working our butts off in stealth mode ever since. While our goal has always been to build something we would use ourselves, we decided from the beginning that we would not do this in a black box. Talking to potential customers from day 1 has been our highest priority. We’re now hosting 25+ early evangelists and have learned a great deal about what various types of people want out of WordPress itself and their hosting provider.
First and foremost is speed. It’s an addicting trait that neither we nor our users can get enough of it. Forget typical blogs. We run WP Engine like you would run any popular web application. We utilize proxy servers, database caching, content delivery networks, minificaiton, image compression, and every other trick in the book to make sure your site loads as fast as possible.
Security is equally important. Ah the great debate. WordPress and security. We understand that security is an area of dark and deep magic. Many people don’t understand how or why “hacks” occur. Nor should you. We take that responsibility on ourselves and will never pass the blame. We don’t think we will ever need to either.
Worried about your site staying up because you’ve been *Fireballed or TechCrunch covers your awesome product? 1 We make sure your WordPress powered site takes simultaneous connections in stride. Don’t believe us? We have some amazing customers who previously had this pain point and are now able to sleep better at night because they don’t worry about their site going down. Here is what a few of them have to say about their experience with us:
“It’s really nice to concern ourselves with the content and growth of our blog rather than trying to be my own IT department.” – Jay B Sauceda, Public School
“I self-hosted WordPress for years until I started experiencing crashes every time a post made it to the first page of HackerNews. I switched to WPEngine right before speaking at a major event. Not only did my blog survive the traffic spike, but I’ve doubled the number of subscribers since then and haven’t experienced a single outage yet.” – Ash Maurya
We’re not your grandma’s host. With WP Engine the headaches that come with a standard host are non-existent. We allow you to focus on creating content while we take care of upgrades, backups and maintenance. In fact, don’t think of us as a host at all, think of WP Engine as a WordPress platform where staying out of your way is a feature (unless of course you need help, in which case we’ll respond immediately).
While speed, security, and scalability are our main three tenants we’ve also built and are continually building some really cool extra features. I’ll highlight a few of them here but you can read about them in more detail on our features page and keep up with ongoing development by subscribing to this blog.
- WPE-Staging: This is a custom built plugin that allows you to utilize a staging environment for your site. Click one button and within seconds you have a carbon copy of your WordPress site that you can make changes to, try out new plugins, and edit your theme without worrying about breaking your live site. We think it’s really helpful and our current clients agree!
- WPE-Logs: Sometimes you just need to dig through a log file. We’ve added the ability to view server logs related to your website right into your administrator panel.
In the coming months we’ll be adding some really great content sections to our site, including:
- Curated Plugins: There are thousands of amazing plugins you can add to WordPress. However, sometimes there are a few dozen that do the same exact thing. How do you know which to use? Which is the most secure? Which wont break your site when you turn it on? We’re building a list of plugins both our clients and our team trust.
- Curated Themes: We’re giving themes the same treatment we give plugins. We’ll recommend themes that take advantage of the latest WordPress features and keep security and speed in mind when being developed.
- Tutorials: Never stop learning. While we take care of all the heavy lifting, it never hurts to read up on WordPress! We’ll be offering top notch tutorials on all subjects related to running a WordPress site.
- Affiliate Program: We’ll be opening this up on an invite only basis in the coming weeks. We’d like to make this program extremely attractive to potential partners so we’d like to collect a little more feedback before saying more.
Today we venture out of stealth. We’ll be opening our waiting list to the world on Thursday, July 29th. If you’re interested in trying us out simply enter your email address and we’ll contact you as soon as we’re ready to add you to our platform. Due to high demand the current wait time is 1 – 2 days for a new site. The great part is, once you have a site on WP Engine, we make it extremely easy to migrate over (even if you’re currently self-hosting WordPress).
Please feel free to comment with any questions, ideas, or feedback you might have. We’re really excited to finally get to talk about what we’ve been working so hard on for the past few months and hope you will be too!
Subscribe to this blog for new features, service updates, and some behind-the-scenes action from the WP Engine team here in Austin.
Notes:
- Fireballed: Your website has gone down because DaringFireball.net has covered you. ↩
One of the WordPress developers/team wrote a blog post asking why there wasn't a host that was dedicated to WordPress. I can't find the post off hand, but I bet they'd cover you if you found it.
Since we started working on WP Engine we've noticed quite a few people saying the same thing. I'll have to search and see if I can find that WordPress developer as we'd love to talk to him/her.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention and let us know if you find that post!
I think John is talking about this post by Mark Jaquith: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/web…