Blog from the WordPress plugin company Delicious Brains, covering WordPress, Laravel, server setup, and running a commercial plugin business.
HN links it for WordPress developer guides and its acquisition story, and one commenter cites its caching comparison to question another post's performance claims.
Biggest lesson I learnt was when talking to a dev guy I know about MigrateDBPro[1].
For those who don't know it, it lets you push / pull WordPress sites really easily - local to staging, staging to live, live to staging. It handles media files, database, and it's really solid.
Anyway. I explained it to him and he simply didn't get it. He was like "yeh, but I can do that by dumping the SQL from the live site then importing it to the destination and running a find-replace, then pulling down the media via SFTP".
It dawned on me then that - brilliant though he is (and he really is: one of the best all round devs I know) - he couldn't see the benefit because he 1) was too good at what he did that he didn't see that most people aren't like him, and 2) he simply wasn't the audience.
Now - me - I too can run a SQL dump, a find replace and an import. But - I'm running a business. I have about 50 clients, so about 150 sites (local/staging/live for each). My imperative is to be able to do these migrations with zero effort and in minimal time. I could do it manually, but the time it takes me would be non-trivial.
I fork out that $249 every year for the MDBP premium plugin without even pausing. It's a no-brainer.
It's the same for me with ManageWP. $100 every month - I don't even think about it. Gravity Forms - $259 p/a - ditto.
The point is: these tools are absolutely areas that I could save money on, but:
1) They make me look good to my clients / save my ass on a regular…
> WP Engine seems like it is entirely a mercenary operation.
WP Engine also acquired and maintains Advanced Custom Fields [1] and Local [2] from their subsidiary Flywheel [3].
[1] https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-engine-acquisition/
[2] https://wpengine.com/blog/better-together-wp-engine-and-flywheel-make-local-and-genesis-products-available-to-all-customers/
[3] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-to-acquire-flywheel/
While the tool been showcased here is great, there's really no substitute for doing it yourself and getting your hands dirty. Too many people (not saying you) use these kinds of tools as a crutch instead of learning the basics themselves.
This is a great guide on how to set up SSL on localhost https://deliciousbrains.com/ssl-certificate-authority-for-local-https-development/
Not sure if the performance gains are still valid. There's reports that state the contrary: https://deliciousbrains.com/page-caching-varnish-vs-nginx-fastcgi-cache/
Nginx has something similar to ESI called SSI (http://serverfault.com/questions/406103/main-differences-between-ssi-server-side-include-and-esi-edge-side-include)