Jason Cohen of WP Engine
SUMO Heavy’s Sean Kennedy interviews Jason Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO at WPEngine, about his company and why their WordPress-specific hosting is better than standard hosting companies.
SEAN: We just finished moving our website over to WPEngine’s servers – what kind of features will we be able to look forward to now that we’re all situated?
JASON: First, the site is very fast, especially on the back end.
Second, you can create a staging area with one click – a full copy of your files and database in which you can test changes without them being live, especially upgrades to plugins, themes, and core.
Third, the next time you have a deep question about WordPress or which plugins to use for some task, you can rely on our customer support — something you probably aren’t used to having at your current hosting company.
SEAN: We work primarily with e-commerce sites on the Magento platform. 9 times out of 10, they want a blog to accompany the site and we’ve been using WordPress to meet that demand. What would our clients benefit from using one of the packages you offer as opposed to other, more generic hosts?
JASON: It’s really the same benefits as any site. In particular, lost traffic due to slow pages (people hitting “back” before the page renders and SERPs hurt) means lost sales, so page speed really does equal money.
We like the pairing of WordPress for content and Magento or other platforms for eCommerce because that allows each system to do exactly what it does best.
SEAN: Working off of that previous answer, what if they already have a blog up and running – how easy is it to migrate their data over to your servers?
Generally you can just SFTP your files and upload a database dump, then our tech support can run a script that will change some of the standard configuration (e.g. how WordPress connects to our datatbase).
Or for a flat $300 we can do it all for you!
SEAN: Since we use git really often here at SUMO, I was really intriqued when I heard about you guys using it for you process. How exactly does that speed up your workflow?
It’s a force-multiplier. Anyone who has tried “rsyncing files around” knows it’s slow, error-prone, impossible to debug, and hard to run in a staging context. Git means we have history, we can collaborate, and manage development and deployment.
Click here to try WP Engine for yourself for free for 15 days.
