Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg launched a scathing attack on a rival company this week, calling WP Engine a "cancer on WordPress."
Mullenweg criticized the company – which has been commercializing the WordPress open source project since 2010 – for profiteering without giving back to the community, while disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform.
For those who don't know, WordPress runs more than 40% of the web. Anyone is free to download the open source project and run a website on their own. Here now some companies come to sell hosting services and expertise. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg created in 2005 to monetize the project he had created two years earlier, and WP Engine, a WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14-year history. , most of which came via a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.
It's worth mentioning that Automattic has a history of supporting WordPress hosting companies, having invested in WP Engine itself in 2011, bought a majority stake in WordPress hosting company Pressable in 2016, and later invested in GridPane.
But speaking this week at WordCamp US 2024, a WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg took the stage to read a post he had just published on his personal blog. He cited separate investment commitments made by Automattic and WP Engine to contribute resources to support the sustainable growth of WordPress. with Automattic contributing 3.900 hours per week, while WP Engine contributed just 40 hours.
Mullenweg has criticized at least one other hosting company in the past, accusing GoDaddy of profiting from the open source project without giving anything of substance back. More specifically, he called GoDaddy a "parasitic company" and an "existential threat to the future of WordPress."
In his latest attack, Mullenweg didn't stop at WP Engine. but he extended his criticism to the company's main investor.
"[WP Engine] is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management," Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn't give a damn about open source ideals, they just want a return on capital. So at this point, I'm asking everyone in the WordPress community to think with their wallets. Who are you giving your money to — someone who wants to nurture the ecosystem or someone who will take all the value out of it until it withers away?”
Responding to question submitted by an audience member later, wanting clarity on whether Mullenweg was asking WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said he hoped every WP Engine customer would watch his presentation and when it came time to renew their contract with the company, to think very carefully about his next steps.
"There are a lot of hosting companies, Hostinger, Bluehost, Pressable, etc., that would like to acquire this business," Mullenweg said. “You can get faster performance even when you switch to someone else, and migration has never been easier. It's part of the idea of data freedom. It's, for example, a day's work to change your site to something else, and I'd encourage you to consider that when it's time to renew your contract if you're a WP Engine customer.”
Mullenweg after his speech published a post on his blog, where he calls WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. "It's important to remember that uncontrolled cancer will spread," he says. “WP Engine sets a standard that others can look at and think is okay to reproduce.”
Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is selling an inferior product because the core WordPress project saves every change made to allow users to roll back their content to a previous version – something that WP Engine disables.
Customers can request that revisions be enabled, but WP Engine only supports three revisions, which are automatically deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends that customers use a “third-party processing system” if they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is simple — to save money.
"They turn off revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of changes in the database and they don't want to spend it to protect your content," Mullenweg argues. “They strike at the heart of what WordPress does and destroy the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to restore your content, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content.”
