WordPress Founder Calls WP Engine “A Cancer To WordPress”
On the official WordPress Foundation News site, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had some strong words for WordPress managed hosting company WP Engine, whose approach to WordPress revisions has greatly displeased Mullenweg.
It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they're giving you WordPress, but they're not. And they're profiting off of the confusion. [...]
WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you're trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database.
This is very important, it's at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it's why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.
WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don't want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content. [...]
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it's something that they've chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they're giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it's important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years. (WordPress News)
I was shocked when I read this statement. I thought every WordPress installation preserved revisions, which is very useful when your site crashes.
In disbelief, I actually visited the link @photomatt@mastodon.social mentioned, and I was very surprised to see an explanation of why WP Engine turns off revisions on their support page.
Post Revisions
WordPress Post Revisions, or autosaves, store a record of each saved draft or published update for a post. This system allows a user to see the last few changes and to restore a page or post to a previous version. While great in theory, revisions cause the database to grow exponentially and a large database can directly impact site performance.
Every WP Engine site has WordPress revisions disabled by default. If you need a more extensive revision management system, we recommend using a third-party editing system rather than relying on WordPress revisions.
**Revisions can only be enabled by contacting Support.** Revisions cannot be enabled in the
wp-config.phporphp.inifiles, as this will be overwritten at the server level.If you migrated a site with existing revisions that you would like to preserve, reach out to Support to have revisions enabled.
- Support can help you enable 3 revisions for your posts to start. Revisions should not exceed 5.
- Old revisions will be automatically removed after 60 days.
NOTE
Enabling revisions is not a retroactive change. Only revisions generated after the feature has been enabled will be stored moving forward.
If you would like to clean up your database and delete any existing database revisions, the following query can be run from phpMyAdmin. (WP Engine Support Center)
Mullenweg is almost correct in calling out how WP Engine handles WordPress software. However, calling WP Engine a cancer is over the top, as disabling a core software feature is not akin to a disease that kills approximately 10 million people every year.
WP Engine is obviously limiting revisions to reduce the cost of hosting (as properly hosting WordPress sites is more expensive than rival platforms), but I believe WP Engine should at least provide a premium option to clients for unlimited revision hosting.
Disclosure: I host four blogs on WordPress.com, a WordPress hosting solution by Automattic (& technically a rival to WP Engine) that Matt Mullenweg founded many moons ago.
If you are wondering why I typed this up on a WriteFreely blog instead of WordPress, let's say I enjoy the simplicity of WriteFreely, & the managed hosting solution via Write.as (both founded by @matt@writing.exchange) is world class!
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