http://www.maknesium.de/start-small-stay-small-a-developers-guide-to-launching-a-startup

Have fun

The 4-5 months my website was with WPEngine were the worst in the company’s five-year history. On no less than three separate occasions, WPEngine managed to crash my site. I had more downtime, more hassles, more frustration and more B.S. than I had experienced with all my previous webhosts combined. It was a constant nightmare — hours and hours spent arguing with them and cleaning up messes they left behind. I estimate that between the crashes and 150+ hours of lost productivity, my overall site traffic for 2012 will be 7.5% less than it should have been. Working with WPEngine was a HUGE distraction and massively disruptive.

WPEngine is autocratic. As a “managed webhost,” they feel they are entitled to do whatever they want to your site, whenever they want — without warning and without empathy. The only thing more stunning than their arrogance is the lack of technical chops they display. Despite being touted as “knowledgeable WP experts,” their technicians can’t get one thing right. They can’t integrate a SSL certificate without completely f-ing up your database. Heck, they couldn’t even make a simple change to 5 lines of code without crashing my site for 18 hours.

If you run a simple website that gets modest traffic, AND you don’t know much about WordPress, AND it doesn’t matter if your website goes down for a few days here or there, then go ahead and take your chances with WPEngine. For my website, WPEngine was the worst mistake I’ve ever made. Don’t buy into all the hype.

I know there are some folks out there who will assume that I am a WP moron with cruddy plugins and a messy theme — not the case. If you are a site admin considering WPEngine and would like to discuss my experience, please feel free to contact me. I’ll do whatever I can to spare others from the pain and suffering WPEngine inflicts.