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  1. #1
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    WPengine CDN worth it with personal plan?

    I recently moved to WP Engine from another host. So far, everything's been great. Support isn't always quick but it's fairly responsive. Speed is DEFINITELY faster.

    I'm considering using their CDN but I didn't have a good experience with cloudflare. Not only did I not see any real improvement with my site's speed with them, I had constant downtime (at least once every week or two that I happen to notice when I was trying to access the site myself) that went away as soon as I cut cloudflare out being my CDN.

    I'm right at the cusp of having too much traffic for wpengine's personal plan and not enough to warrant their professional plan. Their professional plan includes their CDN.

    What I'm wondering is if people really see a marked difference in their website speed with the wpengine CDN to make it worth the extra $20/mo in the interim. I've been looking on google for a while but can't find anything yet.

    Anyone have any real data?
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  2. #2
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    CDN rarely helps sites.
    But it's a buzzword right now, so "everybody's doing it".

    KISS = keep it simple, stupid. (ie, no CDN, as it often adds more problems)
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  3. #3
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    That's what I was thinking. I tried cloudflare a while back but didn't see any noticeable improvement - and they had a lot of downtime which affected my site. Didn't help but added another point of failure.

    It's just curious that all these places keep touting the virtues of having a CDN. I'd like to see a breakdown of when it works and when it doesn't.
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  4. #4
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    Skelley1, whether it will help you or not will depend on a lot of factors, like you website structure, type of content, amount of pages / content, type of visitors, what do they do on the site and etc.

    Tell us first what would you like to achieve? Faster page load times?

    There are other methods, like Varnish, Memcached, google have now launched a new page speed service which is again a type of web cache ...

  5. #5
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    I'll have to get back with you on that. My site is << removed >> but it's in transition from a crappy host to an awesome host. I have a site-wide redirect at the moment because of some crazy unrelated plugin conflict that I can't duplicate at home but hopefully the dns will transfer to a new registrar so I can then do an A record to send direct traffic instead of 301 redirects. My posts usually have a few graphics but it's not a photography site. I'm not sure yet where the cutoff is when it becomes beneficial.
    Last edited by writespeak; 04-29-2014 at 11:58 AM.
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  6. #6
    the thing that puts me off wpengine (apart from the horrendous pricing), is that they are basically reselling linode servers, and adding on there server admin costs on top. id be more tempted to get my own linode and find a decent admin, id have way more flexibility

  7. #7
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    If you assume for the moment that you could pay $20/mo for your own server, which is doubtful, that would only leave you $9/mo for a decent admin. Let me know if you figure out how to do that because I'd be very interested.
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  8. #8
    Id get the $10 a month server from digitalocean, which would probably match wpengines pro plan in terms of visitors. I would setup the lemp myself and get a sysadmin to secure it as a one off fee, not monthly. job done.

  9. #9
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    Post HI,

    Quote Originally Posted by skelley1 View Post
    I recently moved to WP Engine from another host. So far, everything's been great. Support isn't always quick but it's fairly responsive. Speed is DEFINITELY faster.

    I'm considering using their CDN but I didn't have a good experience with cloudflare. Not only did I not see any real improvement with my site's speed with them, I had constant downtime (at least once every week or two that I happen to notice when I was trying to access the site myself) that went away as soon as I cut cloudflare out being my CDN.

    I'm right at the cusp of having too much traffic for wpengine's personal plan and not enough to warrant their professional plan. Their professional plan includes their CDN.

    What I'm wondering is if people really see a marked difference in their website speed with the wpengine CDN to make it worth the extra $20/mo in the interim. I've been looking on google for a while but can't find anything yet.

    Anyone have any real data?
    Sorry you had a bad experience. Did you open a support ticket so we could look at the issues?
    CloudFlare Community Evangelist

  10. #10
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    Yes. A few. Both on the server side and on cloudflare's side. Each kept blaming the other. As soon as I dropped the CDN, it went away.
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by skelley1 View Post
    Yes. A few. Both on the server side and on cloudflare's side. Each kept blaming the other. As soon as I dropped the CDN, it went away.
    This is typical.
    In theory, on paper, Cloudflare is great. But reality isn't a piece of paper.
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  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by kpmedia View Post
    This is typical.
    In theory, on paper, Cloudflare is great. But reality isn't a piece of paper.
    I'm guessing it could be related to who the CDN provider is...which I've seen mixed reviews about.

    I know of some sites that run smoothly with CDN's, but every site is unique, so what may work for some may not for others.



    Quote Originally Posted by audioedge View Post
    I would setup the lemp myself and get a sysadmin to secure it as a one off fee, not monthly. job done.
    Did you mean LAMP?



    Quote Originally Posted by skelley1 View Post
    I'm considering using their CDN but I didn't have a good experience with cloudflare.

    I think we "ran" into each other in another thread related to your site. Are your visitors local or spread across the country and/or other countries?

    If the majority of your visitors are local, even within a half country radius, you mostly likely will not need CDN. Now that your on a better host, and your relatively close to the server of your account, the difference of adding a CDN will be minimal.
    Last edited by WPCYCLE; 11-18-2013 at 08:06 PM.

  13. #13
    I have mixed impressions about CloudFlare too. My websites sometimes would slow down because of them but other times it worked perfectly.
    But I did see a big difference in Free and Pro packages, the website became much more responsive and server now sees a lot less hits with the Pro package.

    But I disagree with people that say CDNs are just a buzz word. They do help but in different levels for different websites. A CDN will do a very big difference for a website with a lot of traffic. These people have the option to either buy multiple servers in different locations to load balance their traffic and improve web performance or go with a tested solution of a CDN.

    Smaller website can benefit by CDNs too but in a smaller scale. Pay per use CDNs like MaxCDN are a perfect example.

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by audioedge View Post
    the thing that puts me off wpengine (apart from the horrendous pricing), is that they are basically reselling linode servers, and adding on there server admin costs on top. id be more tempted to get my own linode and find a decent admin, id have way more flexibility
    Hey Audioedge,

    At first glance, WP Engine would definitely appear that way, but there's a lot more to it than reselling another provider's infrastructure. A lot goes into the architecture on our stack that includes Nginx, Varnish, and Memcache.

    Now, these technologies are widely available for anyone to use, but our experience and skillset has allowed us to provide a config and combination of settings to work really well with WordPress. Taking on the work and hassle is a huge thing for our customers, but as a Managed WordPress host, we don't claim to be a fit for everyone as there are clear pros and cons of our service. I hope this helps.
    Last edited by Tin; 11-18-2013 at 09:01 PM. Reason: typo
    Tin Pham
    Solutions Engineer
    WP Engine - WordPress Hosting, Perfected.

  15. #15
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    90% of my customers are US and Canada but I do have a growing number of others, especially UK and AUS.

    I don't really get all that much traffic yet. I'm averaging about 50k/mo pageviews right now.

    I think I'll hold off on doing a CDN right now.
    Learn survival/prepper information from a combat veteran at Graywolf Survival

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by 48-14 View Post
    Did you mean LAMP?
    https://library.linode.com/lemp-guides

    Nope lemp. Nginx instead of apache

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by audioedge View Post
    https://library.linode.com/lemp-guides

    Nope lemp. Nginx instead of apache
    Cool. Just checking.

    Most of us have to remember that the "common" WP user is not tech savvy and all of this would be over their head. They just want to log in, post, and publish. That's it. What's happens under the hood, if the site is valuable, they will pay to make sure it's up.

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