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And, ironically, their site is down. That's a pretty bad sign for a service that's supposed to provide a more performant installation of Wordpress. I hope it's

by timdorr 14y ago

And, ironically, their site is down. That's a pretty bad sign for a service that's supposed to provide a more performant installation of Wordpress. I hope it's actually something on the hosting side of things (or maybe they don't use WP for their main site...)

ry0ohki 14y ago
I've had really bad luck with their uptime. It doesn't help that they seem under constant DDOS attack.
- dotBen 14y ago
  Yeah, our DNS provider Zerigo had a nasty DDOS attack over Sunday that many sites got caught up in, including us. As you can imagine, mitigating DDOS on a nameserver is tricky due to the nature of the requests coming in - harder to Deep Packet Inspect and scrub, or easily identify patterns of bad traffic access to zero-route.
  - neilwillgettoit 14y ago
    1. third party zone transfers 2. Anycast DNS 3. Use more than one provider. 4. warm spares that are not in delegation until needed.
    - dotBen 14y ago
      Yup, we're switching to multiple providers. The fact that there were already multiple geographically redundant IPs should have averted most issues, but someone made a highly-coordinated attack on the provider at all their IPs. We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/
dotBen 14y ago
That's strange, we've not had any notifications of downtime from our own monitoring. I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.
- timdorr 14y ago
  It wasn't working for me before, but appears up now that I'm at home. I was on Georgia Tech campus (which I believe peers with Level3 for most commercial traffic), if that helps. Might have been a backend/infrastructure thing (like I hoped).
CubicleNinjas 14y ago
What is terrifying is that WordPress is very easy to set-up caching so it can withstand heavy loads. Not setting this up either means: a) They don't know as much about WP as they ought to. b) Their service is bad. Even Bluehost/Dreamhost can take heavy traffic without problem when WP is set-up properly.
- dotBen 14y ago
  Or perhaps c) there's one of many reasons why the site wasn't reachable at the time from the university campus where the person reported in from. They went home, it works from their home ISP. We're not seeing any other reports of downtime or unavailability across any of our monitoring. No one else here is reporting "down for me too". The fact that our site was unavilable for them on their university campus, while still concerning, hardly equates to "we don't know much about WordPress" or "our service is bad". And "terrifying"... really?
  - CubicleNinjas 14y ago
    "No one else here is reporting "down for me too"." Except for the other person who complained in the responses about uptime. Or the tweets from people reporting that their site is down, and your site is down: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40wpengine%20down https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40wpengine%20down "And "terrifying"... really?" When you get hit with a heavy load and go down, it is an huge issue for a web business. The whole point is to drive large amounts of traffic, and so if a marketing campaign is successful you're paying for nothing. Apparently you don't think that web based businesses having downtime is an issue. Worse yet, your casual and downright confrontational attitude when confronted with actual evidence. So, yes, WPEngine...terrifying.
    - marcamillion 14y ago
      Keep calm and carry on. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, and try building a company that is pushing tech boundaries. Not saying you aren't, but based on your tone it would indicate that a) You don't know what it's like to roll out something that generates a lot of interest in a short-period of time, or b) Have forgotten what it's like to be in that situation. No matter how prepared you are, dealing with a huge burst of traffic in a very short period of time is the quintessential "hard problem" for web developers - especially in modern web businesses where anything can cause the site to slow (e.g. an expired cache on a node on a CDN that happens to be slow/down during the window you launched, that also happens to be serving some asset other aspects of your site rely on - css/js/etc.). Even Google, Amazon & Apple, who have boatloads of cash and hundreds of man-decades of experience building web infrastructure still have issues like this on a launch day. So cut them some slack. When it's your turn to be in that position, we will do our best to return the favor.

by timdorr 14y ago

ry0ohki 14y ago

I've had really bad luck with their uptime. It doesn't help that they seem under constant DDOS attack.

dotBen 14y ago
Yeah, our DNS provider Zerigo had a nasty DDOS attack over Sunday that many sites got caught up in, including us. As you can imagine, mitigating DDOS on a nameserver is tricky due to the nature of the requests coming in - harder to Deep Packet Inspect and scrub, or easily identify patterns of bad traffic access to zero-route.
- neilwillgettoit 14y ago
  1. third party zone transfers 2. Anycast DNS 3. Use more than one provider. 4. warm spares that are not in delegation until needed.
  - dotBen 14y ago
    Yup, we're switching to multiple providers. The fact that there were already multiple geographically redundant IPs should have averted most issues, but someone made a highly-coordinated attack on the provider at all their IPs. We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/

dotBen 14y ago

That's strange, we've not had any notifications of downtime from our own monitoring. I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.

timdorr 14y ago
It wasn't working for me before, but appears up now that I'm at home. I was on Georgia Tech campus (which I believe peers with Level3 for most commercial traffic), if that helps. Might have been a backend/infrastructure thing (like I hoped).

CubicleNinjas 14y ago

What is terrifying is that WordPress is very easy to set-up caching so it can withstand heavy loads. Not setting this up either means: a) They don't know as much about WP as they ought to. b) Their service is bad. Even Bluehost/Dreamhost can take heavy traffic without problem when WP is set-up properly.

dotBen 14y ago
Or perhaps c) there's one of many reasons why the site wasn't reachable at the time from the university campus where the person reported in from. They went home, it works from their home ISP. We're not seeing any other reports of downtime or unavailability across any of our monitoring. No one else here is reporting "down for me too". The fact that our site was unavilable for them on their university campus, while still concerning, hardly equates to "we don't know much about WordPress" or "our service is bad". And "terrifying"... really?
- CubicleNinjas 14y ago
  "No one else here is reporting "down for me too"." Except for the other person who complained in the responses about uptime. Or the tweets from people reporting that their site is down, and your site is down: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40wpengine%20down https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40wpengine%20down "And "terrifying"... really?" When you get hit with a heavy load and go down, it is an huge issue for a web business. The whole point is to drive large amounts of traffic, and so if a marketing campaign is successful you're paying for nothing. Apparently you don't think that web based businesses having downtime is an issue. Worse yet, your casual and downright confrontational attitude when confronted with actual evidence. So, yes, WPEngine...terrifying.
  - marcamillion 14y ago
    Keep calm and carry on. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, and try building a company that is pushing tech boundaries. Not saying you aren't, but based on your tone it would indicate that a) You don't know what it's like to roll out something that generates a lot of interest in a short-period of time, or b) Have forgotten what it's like to be in that situation. No matter how prepared you are, dealing with a huge burst of traffic in a very short period of time is the quintessential "hard problem" for web developers - especially in modern web businesses where anything can cause the site to slow (e.g. an expired cache on a node on a CDN that happens to be slow/down during the window you launched, that also happens to be serving some asset other aspects of your site rely on - css/js/etc.). Even Google, Amazon & Apple, who have boatloads of cash and hundreds of man-decades of experience building web infrastructure still have issues like this on a launch day. So cut them some slack. When it's your turn to be in that position, we will do our best to return the favor.