Where V4 Missed the Mark

[lotusjeff]

V4 is being built to support the needs of a hosting business. A business supporting hundreds of sites needs to prevent Site A from interfering or accessing Site B.

This requirement is met by having every site being a standalone docker site. This adds complexities the average publisher will never be able to resolve.

For example, something as simple as a WWW to non-WWW redirect requires an individual publisher to understand the differences between a proxy-nginx and a site nginx. Which config file do you use? How do I restart each one? Why are there two? A hosting business can support this level of complexity.

An individual publisher cannot be expected to support this level of complexity. An individual publisher just wants to run WordPress on a VPS server. Without having to have detailed technical knowledge.

The first rule in technical architecture - Keep It Simple.

V4 != Easy != Keep It Simple

[bowefrankema]

I feel this is unfair criticism. Because whilst the philosophy of KISS certainly makes a lot of sense it does not if you’re building an Enterprise-grade hosting solution for agencies/freelancers who want to provide a level of service that goes beyond spinning up a cPanel/Plesk server etc.

There is solid reasoning behind the team to choose Docker and build v4 in the way they did. It requires some time and dedication from your end to get familiar with the available commands, the do’s and dont’s and how to customise the individual sites you deploy.

If you’re not willing to learn this or simply feel that the decisions made by the development team don’t support your vision of how websites should be managed, then try something else that works better for you.

It took me about a week of learning to get familiar with v4 and so far I’ve literally had zero downtime and moved all my large clients to v4 with amazing results. I suggest you simply read the documentation and learn about the Docker fundamentals and you might get what you want in the end

[lotusjeff]

@bowefrankema - Your point is EE is “an Enterprise-grade hosting solution for agencies/freelancers”.

Rahul, the man behind EE says, “EasyEngine was created to make managing WordPress sites on Nginx web servers EASY.”

Which is it? These are two completely different goals and with two different customers in mind.

I agree with @bowefrankema. As an enterprise-grade hosting solution, EE V4 will be a great tool. I like the architecture and I am perfectly capable of using and solving problems within the toolset. (I am not the dumb end user you want to paint me as.)

Just by calling it an enterprise-grade hosting solution shows it has missed the original goal Rahul had for the product.

The product is moving from an Easy tool for the average wordpress publisher to an enterprise-hosting solution.

Look at the number of people working to fill the void of an EASY wordpress publishing solution. Just to mention a few: @cim, WordOps

[bowefrankema]

I was not painting you as a dumb user, I was just explaining what I went through when I wrapped my head around v4, and that once you read the docs and the logic behind everything it does make sense. So far this has been a free, open-source solution built by a WP VIP Agency that does what Raul promised fairly well. Especially considering v4 has been released only recently.

EasyEngine was created to make managing WordPress sites on Nginx web servers EASY.

I certainly agree with that product goal/philosophy and I think once you get familiar with everything it takes about a minute to set up a new NGINX powered WP site with SSL Cert / Multisite and even external MySQL.

The complexity you are citing is due to certain decisions that were made and were explained in details during the development process. Like you said you have completely isolated sites thanks to Docker so you can control and monitor individual services.

You do have an additional layers of complexity but in the end it leads to a product that serves a specific purpose for specific users, and “easy” remains a subjective term when it comes to projects like these.

And I also understand that a lot of people do not find it easy or are frustrated, but I don’t agree that this is because of fundamental mistakes made during development or due to the direction RTCamp took.

[cim]

@lotusjeff my docker stack is slowing growing in features.

And here’s auto scaling in action, modified a config to trigger the auto scale.

[madbradjohnson]

lotusjeff and bowefrankema am not a noob to technical issues, where I ran IT environments on an international level. However I was new to WP hosting a few years ago as I moved from IT to start a new business. I needed to setup my own servers and I found EEv3. Which allowed me to build my websites without having to worry about the actual software underneath, which is great. (I am also not proficient in Linux).

I have now moved over to EEv4. first, the performance is superb, outperforms V3 hands down.
But the bottom line is that it is not Easy. Now I need to learn more underlying tech where my business is not focused on IT anymore.

EE is meant to be flipping easy. V3 was flipping easy.