WordPress has always stood out as a shining example of open-source innovation, created in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little with the vision of empowering people to manage their websites seamlessly. Over the years, it has grown into a robust ecosystem fueled by a community-driven philosophy. However, as the ecosystem matured, companies like WP Engine started playing an increasingly commercial role, sometimes at odds with the spirit of open-source collaboration.

WP Engine was once a company I admired deeply. For years, I successfully launched and managed countless projects on their platform without major issues. Their performance and reliability initially felt like the perfect fit. But around four to five years ago, my experience took a sharp turn for the worse, leaving me frustrated and disillusioned.

A Breach of Ethics and Customer Trust

One of the first red flags was how WP Engine handled communication with my clients. I’ve maintained long-standing relationships with many of them, as I manage their websites directly. Without my consent, WP Engine obtained their phone numbers from their websites and started contacting them directly. Let me remind you: the accounts were under my name, and I was the one paying the bills. Despite this, they bypassed me entirely, reaching out to my clients with bold claims of “critical issues” on their websites. They would demand to speak to the “most senior decision-maker” as though the fate of the website depended on it.

This was not only unprofessional but also deeply frustrating. How can you justify cold-calling someone’s client and undermining the very person responsible for building and maintaining the site? And what were these so-called critical issues? We’re talking about websites running on a $25/month hosting plan—hardly the kind of setup that warrants such dramatic intervention.

Unethical Sales Tactics

This wasn’t a one-time issue. I experienced this behavior repeatedly. On one occasion, they flagged “4,000 Ajax calls” on a client’s site as a problem, insisting that we needed to upgrade to a higher-tier plan or even a dedicated server. Their tone was veiled with politeness but carried an underlying threat: “What would you do if the site goes offline?” they’d ask, attempting to scare us into agreeing.

When I pressed for specifics—such as whether this was 4,000 calls in a second, a day, or a year—they couldn’t provide a clear answer. Instead, they’d pivot to blaming the site itself: “The website isn’t coded well; it’s the root cause of these issues.” Really? What part isn’t coded well? What’s the actual problem? Give me statistics, give me something concrete, and I’ll fix it. But no, it was all smoke and mirrors designed to upsell me to their $600/month plan.

The Final Straw

Things escalated further when they started causing deliberate issues with another site I managed. While I can’t prove it outright, their behavior made it hard not to suspect malice. Every day, new problems would mysteriously arise. Finally, my team, being well-organized and professional, decided to move all sites to another hosting provider. The migration took just 10 minutes, and within the same day, the sites were live on a new platform.

WP Engine didn’t take this well. They chased after us for unpaid agency commissions, which, frankly, we couldn’t care less about. After everything they put us through, continuing any form of relationship with them—ethical or otherwise—was out of the question.

Looking Back

WP Engine, in my eyes, is no longer a trustworthy company. Their aggressive sales tactics and complete disregard for client relationships turned them from a service I once respected into a source of constant frustration. While I’m reluctant to use harsher words, the contrast between my initial admiration and their current state is baffling. How did they go from being a reliable hosting provider to this?

To put this into perspective, after migrating to Rocket.net, I had similar issues within two years. They blamed bots for excessive traffic and tried to upsell me to a $1,000/month plan. It took just 15 minutes to migrate to Cloudways, where we also faced limitations down the road.

It’s clear that my overall experience with hosting providers has been mixed at best. But WP Engine remains a particularly painful disappointment. At the end of the day, I’m left wondering: What happened to the WP Engine I used to trust?