I’ve been a WP Engine (WPE) customer for years. Love the service. Amazing support. Awesome founder. But when you’re running a pet project on the back of a WordPress Multisite installation, all it takes to switch is an overage bill that exceeds your monthly charge and even exceeds the charge you’d typically pay for the “Scale” plan. That is, my little publication network is hogging so much bandwidth that it had to be migrated twice and then kicked me in the … wallet, adding insult to injury.

Fast-forward to Day 9 of 2020 and I’m in the midst of migrating dozens of sites away from WP Engine to DigitalOcean (DO) via Cloudways. The difference? Holy moo! TTFB on my dedicated DO droplet is a fraction of that running sites on a shared WPE server. The WP Dashboard loads instantly! Imagine that! No one or two-second delay. It’s like I’m running WordPress locally. Plus, I get insightful data via New Relic. Did I mention I actually know my server specs? Try asking WPE what your site’s running on. It’s a black box. Horizontal scaling? I can manage that through a few clicks. Done. Best of thing of all? I’m paying a fraction of the price — BAM.