If you keep track of news in the WordPress community, you’ll note some big announcements as of late. Besides the rustling of Matt Mullenweg’s new position and that his net worth tops $40 million, there have been other things brewing.
Acquisitions Aplenty
The enterprise space has been a bit active. Just a few short months ago the very cool folks over at VeloMedia acquired Crowd Favorite, which led to the new Crowd Favorite announcing the acquisition of Pixel Jar this month. In the midst of all this craziness, at the close of 2013 10up announced the acquisition of BrainStorm Media.
To outsiders this may seem like insignificant events. To those of us within the WordPress community, we know this activity has greater meaning. It is a sign of maturity and transition.
A Focus on Funding
Last week WP Engine announced that they raised $15 million in growth funding from North Bridge Growth Equity. In the announcement they stated this was designed to accelerate their “growth and innovation”.
Again, to many this is just another announcement. Those of us within the community know this is a bit of a milestone.
It illustrates the change in WordPress adoption and usage. It shows that companies big and small are starting to view WordPress in a new light. It validates the fact that WordPress is more than a blog platform and that it is a true CMS solution. It also clearly states there is a lot of money within the WordPress community.
As a business owner, this has even greater impact to me. In 2013 I started sending our clients to WP Engine and two other hosting companies. I made a concentrated effort to move away from the standard shared hosting providers because they could not provide adequate performance. WP Engine lived up to their promise. Their performance was fabulous and new hosting even came with a nifty little staging area. Hearing this announcement of funding only further solidifies my belief in them as a WordPress hosting company.
As someone who loves WordPress and the community deeply, I am excited about these announcements. It paints a bright future for WordPress software, our community, and our user base.
I can’t wait to see what the rest of 2014 unfolds.
Very interesting! In another example of WordPress’ magnitude (and probably WP Engine’s), I just saw that GoDaddy is offering managed WordPress hosting. I’m guessing you won’t be switching? 😉
I would never go back to GoDaddy. Not in a million years.
I used them when we first opened the business and it was short lived. All I ever heard was WordPress was at fault, even though issues were clearly server related.
I’ll stick with our current host and WP Engine!
Thanks for the info. I will have to take a look at WP Engine because the shared hosts we’re using aren’t meeting my expectations.
WP Engine is more pricey, but I believe it is worth it’s weight in gold. Solid performance, staging, and good support. A win-win for you and your clients.
I tried wp engine and it was a terrible experience. Support took days to respond and responses were token responses, not meaningful troubleshooting. The included cdn was misconfigured when I asked for a custom URL and they suggested I use some other cdn after many days of not fixing it or responding to my request. I believe their forced upgrade policy to latest WordPress update is misguided and results in less security rather than the greater security they claim this policy provides. This policy is also why they were so slow addressing my technical issues…they were busy working on forced wordpress updates vs. customer outages and requests. They were friendly and did honor my refund request under their 60 day risk free policy and I believe they sincerely want to provide good service but growth and the misguided forced upgrade policy seem to have resulted in a dysfunctional approach to prioritizing support resources.
Kelly thanks so much for commenting and providing your experience. I always like our readers to have a well rounded view of WordPress.
What host did you end up migrating to and was your experience positive?
I have also tried out WordPress and found it too limiting and I had real concerns about security.
I want fantastic customer service and support which is something WordPress didn’t offer.
Plus I try to stick with British companies whenever I can.
However, I do think its a great for developers who want to develop their skills.