I’m a born developer. I was building and running websites in the 1990s, and started working with WordPress, for blogs initially, in 2005. And by the time I founded WP Clipboard, WordPress had become my CMS of choice.

I honestly don’t recall exactly how I heard about WP Engine. Someone must’ve mentioned it to me, so I tried it out. It performed really well in all of my tests, and the 24×7 customer support was amazing (I can reach someone within minutes on a Sunday morning on UK time – that’s unheard of elsewhere in the hosting industry).

I am now in the process of transferring all of my sites to WP Engine. Why? Because of the geeky stuff.

With WP Engine, I know I won’t have to go through people who have no idea about WordPress – I receive support from specialists, folks who geek out on WordPress like I do. At the same time, WP Engine doesn’t stand still – the company continues to innovate. When many hosts are comfortably numb and set in their ways, WP Engine continues to release new features and functions, and improve the infrastructure and invest in future innovation.

And that’s not all. The WP Engine offers terrific uptime, a staging environment, automated backups, a simple and intuitive control panel, and speed – even the shared hosting at WP Engine is faster than an 8GB VPS, which can often cost a good portion more.

But the proof is in the pudding. Let’s get geeky and look at the numbers. Since we soft launched WP Clipboard on WP Engine in September 2014, we’ve only had two minutes of downtime – and that was during a development install, so it could’ve been caused by us messing around. Since our formal launch in November 2014, we haven’t had minute one of downtime. That’s absolutely amazing considering WP Clipboard was moved to new servers twice since the formal launch, and the site became the largest WordPress content aggregator in just 20 days. And on top of all that our average response time is 234 milliseconds, a great result considering the amount of loading.

How’s that stack up against other hosts? During that same time period, our well-equipped using 8GB VPS server with a solid UK host and a full maintenance plan suffered 13.5 hours of downtime across 60 outages in total, resulting in uptime of 99.64 percent.

Even more so, one of our busiest websites had a response time of 2,500 milliseconds with our previous host (and it was killing us) , which was reduced to an average of just 250 milliseconds when migrated over to WP Engine (i.e. more 10 times faster)! Now, that is a “wow” factor for you right there.

I look at it this way: WP Engine offers a lot of features that save time and money, and I get a reliable and trustworthy host with great support from people who know the geeky side of the business. And the numbers don’t lie.

We wouldn’t host our websites anywhere else.


Konstantin Yelin creates stuff online. He is founder of WP Clipboard and runs Cambridge ICT. He loves chess, medieval castles, and garden walks.