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This to me sounds a lot like wordpress.com, albeit over-priced. I did a cursory price comparison. WP.com is the most annoyingly secretive website I've seen abo

This to me sounds a lot like wordpress.com, albeit over-priced. I did a cursory price comparison. WP.com is the most annoyingly secretive website I've seen about it's pricing, so all these are from the second hand accounts in the forums ( http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/please-be-more-up-front-about-upgrade-pricing http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/please-be-more-up-front... ): CSS upgrade $15 Map domain: $10 25GB space: $90 (I know WP Engine is 10GB) Unlimited users: $30 No ads: $30 $175, per year, which is roughly $15/mo. The one thing missing from WP.com is the custom plugins and support. Honestly, if you're running my blog, why do I need support, really? And they have proven infrastructure, which is another selling point you're making. The plugins make for an interesting offering, but is it really worth it? Please don't take this as me being rude. I just can't see much of a difference between WP Engine and wp.com after reading the websites to justify the price difference. Maybe that's something to work on?

technosailor 16y ago
WordPress.com is a great service and you can get a lot of the same "stuff" that we offer. Obviously, they've been around a lot longer and have a ton of experiece. WordPress.com has, essentially, two pricing structures - free and custom pricing starting at $500 for VIP customers. They make a ton of money in upgrades, as you noted. They don't give you access to the files, unless you're VIP, and then you're still limited. You don't have access to plugins of your own choice. The freedom that you have with WordPress.org (self-hosted) doesn't exist on the theme, plugin or user side. But you get an amazing architecture, with almost no downtime, and a crack staff that knows WordPress inside and out. WP Engine targets an entirely different market. We're targeting self hosted WordPress and trying to provide premium value for premium blogs. You couldn't take my blog, for example (http://technosailor.com http://technosailor.com), and put it on WP.com. There's too much I've done with it for it to make sense even if I bought the Custom CSS add-on. I can put it on WP Engine (and do) and get all the stuff that is offered. I don't know if I'm making sense. I hope I am. Certainly, we are still honing our messaging. One big bonus that no one else will give you is free CDN. If you need it, you're going to start at $40/mo roughly. And maybe pay up to 20 cents/GB bandwidth. I think you can see where this, essentially, pays for itself. Plus, we are working with Automattic/WordPress.com and our customers should be seeing the benefits of that soon. Stay tuned. :)
dotBen 16y ago
from http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15845 http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15... WordPress.com…. 1. Doesn’t allow Javascript. (So no dynamic elements and no Google Analytics) 2. Doesn’t allow arbitrary plugins. (Because they severely restrict what they can do — many of the plugins I use on this blog are illegal there.) 3. Doesn’t do the speed optimizations we do (some of our WordPress.com refugee customers report 3x speed improvements) 4. Doesn’t put your media on a CDN for free (not yet announced but we’re starting to roll that out!) 5. Doesn’t have quality, email tech support (you have to troll around on forums) 6. Doesn’t recommend plugins (we know which ones are still supported and work well) 7. Doesn’t have the “staging” feature To name a few.

technosailor 16y ago

WordPress.com is a great service and you can get a lot of the same "stuff" that we offer. Obviously, they've been around a lot longer and have a ton of experiece. WordPress.com has, essentially, two pricing structures - free and custom pricing starting at $500 for VIP customers. They make a ton of money in upgrades, as you noted. They don't give you access to the files, unless you're VIP, and then you're still limited. You don't have access to plugins of your own choice. The freedom that you have with WordPress.org (self-hosted) doesn't exist on the theme, plugin or user side. But you get an amazing architecture, with almost no downtime, and a crack staff that knows WordPress inside and out. WP Engine targets an entirely different market. We're targeting self hosted WordPress and trying to provide premium value for premium blogs. You couldn't take my blog, for example (http://technosailor.com http://technosailor.com), and put it on WP.com. There's too much I've done with it for it to make sense even if I bought the Custom CSS add-on. I can put it on WP Engine (and do) and get all the stuff that is offered. I don't know if I'm making sense. I hope I am. Certainly, we are still honing our messaging. One big bonus that no one else will give you is free CDN. If you need it, you're going to start at $40/mo roughly. And maybe pay up to 20 cents/GB bandwidth. I think you can see where this, essentially, pays for itself. Plus, we are working with Automattic/WordPress.com and our customers should be seeing the benefits of that soon. Stay tuned. :)

dotBen 16y ago

from http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15845 http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15... WordPress.com…. 1. Doesn’t allow Javascript. (So no dynamic elements and no Google Analytics) 2. Doesn’t allow arbitrary plugins. (Because they severely restrict what they can do — many of the plugins I use on this blog are illegal there.) 3. Doesn’t do the speed optimizations we do (some of our WordPress.com refugee customers report 3x speed improvements) 4. Doesn’t put your media on a CDN for free (not yet announced but we’re starting to roll that out!) 5. Doesn’t have quality, email tech support (you have to troll around on forums) 6. Doesn’t recommend plugins (we know which ones are still supported and work well) 7. Doesn’t have the “staging” feature To name a few.