#WP Engine Hosting

[topratedhostings]

WP Engine Hosting Review:

WP Engine is a remarkable hosting service that provides many advanced features to help you run your blog/business effortlessly. If you are a growing startup, blog with thousands of visitors, web designer or online course seller, WP Engine is for you.

What is WP Engine Hosting?

WP Engine Hosting is an award-winning hosting company that provides top-notch services to a plethora of successful businesses around the world.

Features of WP Engine Hosting:

WP Engine understands all the critical components a hosting service must provide to its customers.

Whether it’s internet security, downtime or page loading speed, the company takes care of all by offering many features.

Let’s discuss the features that make WP Engine a remarkable hosting service.

Auto Migration: The company provides a migration plugin to help you migrate your existing website including databases and replaces the domain values seamlessly without getting technical.

Automated Backups: The service automatically backs up your website daily with 40 backup points. You can also back up your site manually.

CDN and SSL Certifications: With the click of a button, you can access the global content delivery network (MaxCDN) to disperse assets at many worldwide servers. You also get a free SSL certificate, making sure your site has an extra layer of protection.

Advanced Security: WP Engine automatically detects malicious code, malicious traffic, blocks any DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, and requests attempting to scrape for author ID information. Well, if you get hacked, WP Engine will fix it for free.

Local Development: One-click is all you need to install WordPress. But you can also utilize a full-featured local environment like MySQL, Hot-Swap PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.3 to code your dream website.

WordPress Plugins and Themes: With WP Engine you get access to over 55,000 WordPress plugins including over 36 premium StudioPress themes and the famous Genesis framework.

Staging Environments and Updates: You get access to Development, Staging, and Production environments to change your website without affecting the live one. WP Engine also automatically keeps your website updated to WordPress changes and caches static content to improve your site’s functionality and speed.

Pros & Cons of WP Engine Hosting:

Every WP Engine service delivers unparalleled quality compared to other companies in the market. With a customer satisfaction rating of 97%, it makes every step of your hosting journey smooth.

Pros:

Apart from all the incredible features WP Engine provides, there are many remarkable perks you get.

Fast loading Speeds: WP Engine has the least latency and provides the fastest page loading speeds in the market.

Reliability and High Performance: You get 99.99% server uptime and control over traffic spikes, with a promise of compensation if your uptime falls.

WordPress Expert Support: With access to a trackable ticketing system, support via live chat and phone call option, you get 24/7/365 support from experts.

Money-Back Guarantee: A 60-day money-back-guarantee if you’re dissatisfied with service.

Advanced Security: Automatic Backups, advanced firewalls and continuous checkups provide top-quality security against data loss, hacks and malicious codes.

Cons:

WP Engine stays true to its promises of providing value to the customers. While there are a few cons, the pros outweigh them.

WordPress-Only: WP Engine works only with WordPress, which is fine for many.

Price Point: WP Engine provides a bit expensive plans, but if you need real value, it’s worth every penny.

No Domains or Email Hosting: Like many hosting services, you don’t get email hosting or domain registration with WP Engine.

WP Engine Pricing:

With WP Engine, you are paying for security, speed and smooth performance. Let’s discuss all the pricing plans the company offers.

All plans vary based on the traffic volume, disk storage amount, bandwidth requirement and number of WordPress installs.

With each plan, you get:

- Git version control

- Staging environments and CDN

- Transferable WordPress installations

- Free SSL certificates and SSH access

Startup: $20/monthProfessional: $39/monthGrowth: $77/monthScale: $193/monthCustom: Contact to get a personalized quote25,000 visits per month75,000 visits per month100,000 visits per month400,000 visits per monthMillions of visits per month50 GB bandwidth per month125 GB bandwidth per month200 GB bandwidth per month500 GB bandwidth per month400 GB+ bandwidth per month10 GB storage15 GB storage25 GB storage50 GB storage100 GB- 1 TB storageOne site includedThree sites includedTen sites included30 websites included30 sites includedBest for: Small websites, ecommerce stores and blogs.

Buy Now!Best for: Small to medium websites, ecommerce stores and blogs with consistent traffic spikes.

Buy Now!Best for: Growing businesses, ecommerce stores and blogs

Buy Now!Best for: Fast-growing businesses, ecommerce stores and blogs.

Buy Now!Best for: Enterprise businesses and ecommerce stores.

Buy Now!

Final Verdict:

There’s a lot to love about WP Engine Hosting. With unrivaled features it’s undoubtedly one of the best WordPress hosting services in the world. Anyone looking for a feature-rich, value-for-money hosting service, should go for it.

Attributes Rating: Based on what verified users say about each of the hosting attribute. WP Engine stands out when it comes to user likelihood to continue working with, performance, support and ease of use. website

[tomiadigital]

WP Engine: Fast, Secure Web Hosting

Discover how WP Engine web hosting services can supercharge your WordPress site with lightning-fast performance, top-tier security, and expert support. Whether you're running a personal blog or a high-traffic business website, WP Engine offers scalable solutions tailored to your needs. Explore features like automated updates, daily backups, and advanced caching to ensure a seamless user experience.

[ganesh85465]

WP Engine is a well-known managed WordPress hosting provider.

It offers a range of features and services tailored specifically for WordPress websites, making it a popular choice among businesses, bloggers, and developers who seek reliable, high-performance hosting solutions.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

Another Matt update

11.10: Automattic taunts WP Engine with loss tracker website, which likely uses data mined from .org

A new website (childishly) named WordPress Engine Tracker claims to track the sites that have migrated away from WP Engine and to other hosts. It’s an official Automattic project, and the public GitHub repo is by an Automattic employee.

It’s a dick move. But it’s also a baffling move, if your legal defense is “I didn’t do this to try and bust-out my biggest rival and take their money.” Because wow, it sure seems like making your biggest rival fail is a thing you’re really excited about and watching closely, as you all but take credit for it.

As usual this is per Josh Collinsworth’s ongoing coverage of Matt’s meltdown

[alanshemper]

[17 Oct 2024]

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made another buyout offer this week, and threatened employees who speak to the press with termination.

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog.

But many stayed at Automattic even though they didn't agree with Mullenweg’s actions, telling 404 Media they remained due to financial strain or the challenging job market. Several employees who remained at the company describe a culture of paranoia and fear for those still there.

"Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me.

The current and former Automattic employees I spoke to for this article did so under the condition of anonymity, out of concerns about retaliation from Mullenweg.

“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” another current employee told me. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”

Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company.

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months). Mullenweg wrote:

“New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.”

“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”

Mullenweg and Automattic did not respond to requests for comment.

This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic.

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he's treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.)

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

Mullenweg didn’t block emails from the @teamblind.com domain, Blind said. According to Slack messages viewed by 404 Media, instead, he redirected those emails to himself.

“We are disappointed when we hear employers or executives try to limit access to Blind. Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss. Blind's mission is to bring transparency to the workplace, as we believe it can inspire meaningful change,” the spokesperson for Blind said. “Employers' attempts to block Blind are misguided and often have the opposite intended effect. Generally, we have seen more employees register and use Blind when their company tries to restrict access.”

One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it's ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I've never questioned an employer's judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),” they said. “Clearly, Blind is designed to allow employee discussion free from employer interference, and he was trying to prevent that in the most obvious way possible.”

Instead of Blind, employees have been posting on Anonymattic, an anonymous message board set up on WordPress’s own systems that allows all employees to post using one login.

“A common theme for posts on Anonymattic is ‘Any time I try to get work done, some new drama comes up and I get distracted.’ I know that's true for me,” an employee told me.

“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt's actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can't relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.

Anonymattic was “conveniently closed down around Covid with the excuse of avoiding toxic discussions,” an employee told me. “I say conveniently because people would post their opinions and complaints to leadership that were sometimes uncomfortable. That’s when the Blind migration happened.” They said they believe Mullenweg’s interference with Blind emails was “an attempt to stop employees from joining Blind in some kind of intimidating fashion (are they collecting who is joining Blind? With what intentions?)” Anonymattic was reopened around that time, they said.

“At the end, even if anonymous, Automattic can delete posts there and not in Blind,” they said.

Last week, in response to someone criticizing his decision to add a checkbox to the WordPress.org login that forced users to denounce affiliation with WP Engine, Mullenweg posted in the WordPress contributor community Slack, “Wait until you see what we have in store for Thursday! And Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday. And Monday.” Several people posted vomiting and face-palm emojis in response to that message.

A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."

[technofeudalism]

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit.  In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀” Mullenweg began to publicly denounce WP Engine in September, calling the web hosting platform a “cancer” to the larger Wordpress open-source project and accusing it of improperly using the WordPress brand. He’s “at war” with WP Engine, in his own words.  In October, Mullenweg added a required checkbox at login for WordPres.org, forcing users to agree that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. The checkbox asked users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” The checkbox was still present and required on the WordPress.org login page as of Wednesday morning. Automattic and Mullenweg have 72 hours from the order to take it down, according to the judge’s order.  WP Engine sent a cease and desist demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted on X.  Automattic sent back its own cease and desist, saying, “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. In October, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote. But shortly after, he reportedly complained that the company was now “very short staffed.”   All of this has created an environment of chaos and fear within Automattic and in the wider WordPress open-source community.  Within 72 hours of the order, Automattic and Mullenweg are also required to remove the “purported” list of WP Engine customers contained in the ‘domains.csv’ file linked to Automattic’s website wordpressenginetracker.com, which Automattic launched in November and tracks sites that have left WP Engine. It’s also required to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, including reactivating and restoring all WP Engine employee login credentials to wordpress.org resources and “disable any technological blocking of WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org that occurred on or around September 25, 2024, including IP address blocking or other blocking mechanisms.” The judge also ordered Mullenweg to restore WP Engine’s access to its Advanced Custom Fields (“ACF”) plugin directory, which its team said was “unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent” and called it a “new precedent” in betrayal of community access. “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction,” a spokesperson for WP Engine told 404 Media. “The order will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine is focused on serving our partners and customers and working with the community to find ways to ensure a vigorous, and thriving WordPress community.” A spokesperson for Automattic told 404 Media: “Today’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.” 

[theoutcastrogue]

"Automattic Inc. and its founder have been sued by a WordPress hosting company that alleges an extortion scheme to extract payments for use of the trademark for the open source WordPress software. Hosting firm WP Engine sued Automattic and founder Matt Mullenweg in a complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

"This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed," the lawsuit said. "The misconduct at issue here is all the more shocking because it occurred in an unexpected place—the WordPress open source software community built on promises of the freedom to build, run, change, and redistribute without barriers or constraints, for all."

The lawsuit alleged that "over the last two weeks, Defendants have been carrying out a scheme to ban WPE from the WordPress community unless it agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to Automattic for a purported trademark license that WPE does not even need."

The complaint says that Mullenweg blocked WP Engine "from updating the WordPress plugins that it publishes through wordpress.org," and "withdrew login credentials for individual employees at WPE, preventing them from logging into their personal accounts to access other wordpress.org resources, including the community Slack channels which are used to coordinate contributions to WordPress Core, the Trac system which allows contributors to propose work to do on WordPress, and the SubVersion system that manages code contributions."

The lawsuit makes accusations, including libel, slander, and attempted extortion, and demands a jury trial. The lawsuit was filed along with an exhibit that shows Automattic's demand for payment. A September 23 letter to WP Engine from Automattic's legal team suggests "a mere 8% royalty" on WP Engine's roughly $400 million in annual revenue, or about $32 million."

[cutecipher]

Matt (of transmisogyny fame) is shutting down parts of wordpress. Ill avoid namecalling or the like but I do want to share the meat of this:

Begin quote (from Matt)

As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you.

I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.

If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine.

End quote

[shadowmaat]

Automattically scammy

From what I've been able to piece together, here's the story:

Wordpress.org is a nonprofit that owns the license for Wordpress. It's cofounded by Mutt Mulletwig.

Automattic is a FOR profit org that has been granted exclusive power to sublicense Wordpress. It's owned by Mutt.

Automattic is trying to extort a rival company, WP Engine, by claiming a breach of trademark/licensing, "brand confusion" and other things that don't really stick.

Automattic wants WPE to pay them, the for-profit company called Automattic, millions of dollars.

When WPE failed to give in to extortion demands, they were blocked from the wordpress.org site and presumably will be continued to be blocked unless/until WPE pays up. To Automattic. The for-profit company.

Understanding that a lot of innocent people were being affected by this blockage, rival company Pressable magnanimously stepped forward, offering to help folks switch over to their hosting instead (for a price).

Pressable is owned by Mutt Mulletwig.

I feel sorry for the team of lawyers on tap for this because ye gods, what a nightmare. Oh! Bonus bullet points!

It isn't just Mutt involved in this. Automattic CFO Mark Davies also joined in on the threats against WPE.

The "Five for the Future" shtick Wordpress (or maybe Automattic) is touting is about companies contributing 5% back in time/money, but since they're demanding 8% from WPE that number seems flexible/misleading.

Concerns have been raised regarding exactly how many hours have been contributed as the math isn't panning out.

Questions have also been raised about Wordpress as an actual organization, since it hasn't had board meetings in over 8 years.

Shirt's forked, man. Cook up some more popcorn. Especially if WPE decides to file actual charges. Once an investigation starts... hoo boy.

[smithadam4520]

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site for Better Rankings

A fast-loading website is essential for better SEO, improved user experience, and higher conversions. If your WordPress site is slow, you’re likely losing both visitors and ranking opportunities. Here’s how you can fix that.

Choose the Right Hosting

Your hosting provider sets the foundation for your website’s speed. Shared hosting may be affordable, but it often leads to slow performance. Instead, go for managed WordPress hosting or cloud-based options. Many professional website development services include high-performance hosting setup as part of their package.

Use a Lightweight Theme

A bulky, feature-heavy theme can slow your site down significantly. Switch to a lightweight and optimized theme like Astra, Neve, or GeneratePress to improve load time without compromising design.

Optimize Images

Images are often the biggest contributors to page size. Compress them using tools like ShortPixel or Smush, and use next-gen formats like WebP for faster delivery.

Install a Caching Plugin

Caching helps by storing static versions of your site, reducing the server load. Plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache can make a noticeable difference in performance.

Minify and Combine Files

Reduce the size of your CSS, JS, and HTML files by minifying them. This removes unnecessary characters and spaces to speed up load time. Tools like Autoptimize make this easy.

Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your content across multiple servers globally, ensuring faster access no matter where your visitors are located.

Clean Up Unused Plugins and Database

Too many plugins can slow your site and affect performance. Remove what you don’t use and regularly clean your database using WP-Optimize or similar tools.

Final Thoughts

Speed is a major factor in how users and search engines interact with your site. If you’re unsure where to start, partnering with expert website development services can help you optimize every technical aspect for maximum performance and SEO benefits.

Read more -https://www.janbaskdigitaldesign.com/wordpress-website-design-and-development

[planetofsnarfs]

Ahead of the layoffs, Automattic’s website listed 1,744 employees, which means north of 270 people may have lost their jobs. (Automattic was asked to confirm this number but has not responded as of the time of publication.)

..the move comes after a tumultuous year for Automattic, which has engaged in a controversial legal battle with hosting company WP Engine. The ongoing drama already led to the departure of some Automattic employees last fall.

[jcmarchi]

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-few-ways-that-cloudways-makes-running-this-site-a-little-easier/

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

It’s probably no surprise to you that CSS-Tricks is (proudly) hosted on Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s managed hosting arm. Given both CSS-Tricks and Cloudways are part of DigitalOcean, it was just a matter of time before we’d come together this way. And here we are!

We were previously hosted on Flywheel which was a fairly boutique WordPress hosting provider until WP Engine purchased it years back. And, to be very honest and up-front, Flywheel served us extremely well. There reached a point when it became pretty clear that CSS-Tricks was simply too big for Flywheel to scale along. That might’ve led us to try out WP Engine in the absence of Cloudways… but it’s probably good that never came to fruition considering recent events.

Anyway, moving hosts always means at least a smidge of contest-switching. Different server names with different configurations with different user accounts with different controls.

We’re a pretty low-maintenance operation around here, so being on a fully managed host is a benefit because I see very little of the day-to-day nuance that happens on our server. The Cloudways team took care of all the heavy lifting of migrating us and making sure we were set up with everything we needed, from SFTP accounts and database access to a staging environment and deployment points.

Our development flow used to go something like this:

Fire up Local (Flywheel’s local development app)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Let a CI/CD pipeline publish the changes

I know, ridiculously simple. But it was also riddled with errors because we didn’t always want to publish changes on push. There was a real human margin of error in there, especially when handling WordPress updates. We could have (and should have) had some sort of staging environment rather than blindly trusting what was working locally. But again, we’re kinduva a ragtag team despite the big corporate backing.

The flow now looks like this:

Fire up Local (we still use it!)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Publish to staging

Publish to production

This is something we could have set up in Flywheel but was trivial with Cloudways. I gave up some automation for quality assurance’s sake. Switching environments in Cloudways is a single click and I like a little manual friction to feel like I have some control in the process. That might not scale well for large teams on an enterprise project, but that’s not really what Cloudways is all about — that’s why we have DigitalOcean!

See that baseline-status-widget branch in the dropdown? That’s a little feature I’m playing with (and will post about later). I like that GitHub is integrated directly into the Cloudways UI so I can experiment with it in whatever environment I want, even before merging it with either the staging or master branches. It makes testing a whole lot easier and way less error-prone than triggering auto-deployments in every which way.

Here’s another nicety: I get a good snapshot of the differences between my environments through Cloudways monitoring. For example, I was attempting to update our copy of the Gravity Forms plugin just this morning. It worked locally but triggered a fatal in staging. I went in and tried to sniff out what was up with the staging environment, so I headed to the Vulnerability Scanner and saw that staging was running an older version of WordPress compared to what was running locally and in production. (We don’t version control WordPress core, so that was an easy miss.)

I hypothesized that the newer version of Gravity Forms had a conflict with the older version of WordPress, and this made it ridiculously easy to test my assertion. Turns out that was correct and I was confident that pushing to production was safe and sound — which it was.

That little incident inspired me to share a little about what I’ve liked about Cloudways so far. You’ll notice that we don’t push our products too hard around here. Anytime you experience something delightful — whatever it is — is a good time to blog about it and this was clearly one of those times.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Cloudways is ideal for any size or type of WordPress site. It’s one of the few hosts that will let you BOYO cloud, so to speak, where you can hold your work on a cloud server (like a DigitalOcean droplet, for instance) and let Cloudways manage the hosting, giving you all the freedom to scale when needed on top of the benefits of having a managed host. So, if you need a fully managed, autoscaling hosting solution for WordPress like we do here at CSS-Tricks, Cloudways has you covered.

[bluemoonperegrine]

The WordPress drama marches on

This is bonkers.

On November 8, 2024, The Register reported:

The feud between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and rival web hosting firm WP Engine has led Automattic to create a website that lists WordPress customers who have moved their site hosting away from WP Engine and those who haven't.

Here's an overview of the WordPress/WP Engine feud and Mullenweg acting like a petty tyrant.

[clouds-of-wings]

Kinda relevant for tumblr people to know I guess since the future of our beloved hellsite is also tied to the future of Automattic, unless they eventually wise up and sell tumblr to the Yakuza after all.

The saga that burst into public view in September featured the normally mild-mannered Mullenweg as its central character in a battle with WP Engine, one of the leading providers of WordPress hosting. Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake bought a majority stake in WP Engine in 2018, investing $250 million and obtaining three board seats. “I’ve been doing WordPress for 21 years, I have good relationships with every other company in the world,” Mullenweg said in an interview this week with CNBC. WP Engine’s offense, according to Mullenweg and a cease-and-desist letter his attorneys sent to the company on Sept. 23, revolves around years of trademark violations and WP Engine’s claim that it’s bringing “WordPress to the masses.” “We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along,” Mullenweg wrote in a Sept. 26 post on his personal website, ma.tt. “Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.”

And:

In Mullenweg’s telling of the brouhaha, the battle has been years in the making. He’s been actively trying to strike a deal since January and finally got fed up, he said. But to the outside world, it all felt very sudden. Mullenweg first referenced the matter in public on Sept. 17, in a blog post ahead of WordCamp, the largest annual gathering in the U.S. of WordPress users. The four-day event took place in Portland, Oregon, beginning on Sept. 17. In the post, Mullenweg criticized WP Engine for not contributing enough back to the WordPress ecosystem. He said that Automattic contributed 3,786 hours per week to WordPress.org, (“not even counting me!”) compared to 47 hours for WP Engine. WP Engine says in its lawsuit that those numbers are incorrect and that its contributions back to WordPress were far higher, including through events, conference sponsorships and developing educational resources. For businesses and developers considering who they want to support, Mullenweg had this message: “Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.”

I don't think it's absurd to tell commercial entities that benefit off the work of volunteers that they need to give something back. Sure, it's open source, it's free to use, but people who make something free for everyone generally don't think "Oh wow I hope some big investment firm swoops in and makes a billion off of it!" It's usually made with collaboration, mutual learning and the empowerment of other individuals in mind.

And I mean, we know what happens when big investors get involved in communities that weren't overly commercialized before. It sucks. I think everyone has seen this happen somewhere.