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I can understand Leo not wanting to really dig into the WPEngine/WP debacle, but as one of the sysadmins managing dozens of WPEngine sites for my company it was really annoying that we had to get caught in the middle of this.
Trademark disputes are for the lawyers to fight out. Having to explain to my CTO why our websites might not get security updates anymore was quite the conversation.
This sounds like a problem with your contract with WPEngine. Since they don’t make the product they’re “reselling” the only benefit you might get for choosing them is price or whatever contractual promises they make to you as a customer. If they can’t contractually provide you with a safe product, you should be able to leave them for a better provider who can. Having to fulfill customer expectations, is the only pressure that is going to make them figure out how to get back in line with the actual provider of the service they’re reselling… and/or sign their own reseller contract to make it possible for them to honour their own customer contracts.
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I’m not a lawyer and I wasn’t an employee when this contract was signed. They’re a hosting provider so I don’t know if any of those claims will hold up. WPEngine promised to host our sites, and they have (had 100% uptime last month for the entire account, they do a good job). They can’t really be blamed because someone else decided to block their IPs on 1 day’s notice, can they?
They also found a workaround within a weekend so we’re not really losing out on anything. I can’t point to any measurable harm we suffered because of this, just frustration and emails.
The point being, if they can’t fulfill their contract, you have the right to cancel that contract and move somewhere that can. We have done this with a couple of domain providers, hosting companies and web design agencies over the last few years. The services changed away from what we need and they were no longer fulfilling their agreements with us, so we walked.
Switching providers can be done very quickly, although in our case, we generally did it over the period of a month or so, ensuring everything at the new provider was set up correctly, before pulling the plug.
But that’s just it, WPEngine has been fulfilling their contract this whole time. While everyone was freaking out, our sites were still updating just fine. So our leaving would’ve been extremely reactionary and not something I can justify to my superiors at this time.
And besides, how do we know this is the only hosting company Matt’s gonna fight with? What happens when he gets ticked off at DigitalOcean because there’s millions of WordPress instances pinging his update servers? Am I just gonna hop around every time two CEOs get into a money fight and start throwing lawyers at each other?
Also I don’t think I need to explain to this crowd that since I’m in enterprise IT, one does not simply switch hosting providers. The actual move might take 10 minutes but that’ll only happen after weeks of meeting, planning and testing.
Yes, our move from one provider to another was an enterprise IT level event, that is why it took over a month to complete. The original provider couldn’t or wouldn’t fulfill their contractual obligations, so we had to move - in your case, WPEngine not being able to maintain your instance and ensure security issues are patched in a timely manner would be a breach of contract (at least in my experience, here in the EU) and would enable an immediate cancellation of the contract.
Surely keeping your company and its reputation secure has a higher priority than a feeling of loyalty to WPEngine?