My past few blog posts have been about the feud between Matt Mullenweg (acting as the self-appointed singular voice of the WordPress community, like the Borg Queen) and WP Engine (a big WordPress-focused hosting company, with a controlling share owned by an inherently-gross private equity firm).

Well guess what, WP Engine sucks too. Over the course of the past year I’ve moved a bunch of my clients over to WP Engine and now I am beginning to regret that choice, as I’m starting to see those clients express frustration over WP Engine’s egregious traffic limit overage charges.

Their pricing model is deliberately misleading, with hidden upsells and extra fees. They suck.

The main reason I’ve been moving clients to WP Engine is to get away from hosting I had previously been managing myself on Digital Ocean. I like the Virtual Private Server (VPS) model, where someone like me has direct access to the operating system of a virtualized server. The problem is, these VPS providers are a magnet for spammers. Since you can run whatever software you want on your VPS, it’s easy to set up a server to blast out spam. That sucks. The people who do that suck.

There’s one particular spam blocklist, UCEPROTECTL3, that has decided to block the entire subnet of providers like Digital Ocean. If you check the spam blocklist status of a given IP address on Digital Ocean’s network with MXToolBox, you’ll generally find that the only list that’s blocking it is UCEPROTECTL3, so it seems like a silly outlier. Except for the fact that Microsoft uses UCEPROTECTL3 for spam filtering on all Office 365 email accounts. UCEPROTECTL3 really sucks. And Microsoft sucks for relying on it.

In other words, if your website is running on a Digital Ocean server, you can’t set up SMTP (outgoing email) directly on your server — which is the easiest way to send out emails for things like password resets, WooCommerce receipts, etc., because anyone with an Office 365 email account (which is, like, a lot of people, especially in the business world) won’t get your email. It won’t even go to their spam folder. It will get blocked at the server. Just because some stupid spammers are using different servers that also happen to be hosted by Digital Ocean.

Digital Ocean (and other VPS providers — it’s not just them) responded by basically just washing their hands of the whole thing. “Don’t use our servers to send email.” Well, OK. Then what?

There are several ways to route these emails through other providers like SendGrid, Amazon SES, or your own “real” email account. But they all come with cumbersome hoops to jump through. That sucks.

And that’s why I’ve been moving people to WP Engine. For the relatively small number of emails my clients’ websites generate, WP Engine just handles it. Their systems automatically route emails through a legit sender, everyone gets the emails, I don’t have to mess around with a clunky setup process, and my clients don’t have to sign up for another separate service.

But I have a few clients who, for whatever reason, seem to be magnets for malicious traffic. I’ve got safeguards in place to prevent the malicious visitors from doing anything, but the traffic they generate still counts as “visits” towards WP Engine’s unnecessarily low thresholds. And then my clients get slapped with huge overage fees.

I really don’t know where to turn. Every hosting environment seems to suck in its own way. And it makes me just want to get out of this business altogether. That sucks.

Last night’s stunning victory by the Twins in game 163 to clinch the AL Central Division title from the recently floundering Detroit Tigers was about as exciting a game of baseball as I’ve ever seen… and I not only watched every minute of the 1987 and 1991 playoffs, but I was also in the Metrodome in 1986 on the night when the dome deflated. (OK, that didn’t really have anything to do with the game itself, an unspectacular defeat handed to the hapless Ron Davis after proper dome inflation had been restored.)

The celebration was short-lived though: the Twins knew all along that in less than 24 hours they’d be in the Bronx, facing the best team that money can buy, the New York Yankees.

But as far as I’m concerned, the real championship has already happened. In the final weeks the AL Central was the only division in MLB that was contested. The Tigers’ surprising fall from season-long dominance of the division, and the Twins’ simultaneous, spectacular rise, was legendary. That the Twins’ season would end, for the second year in a row, in a one-game tiebreak to determine the division champ, and in such a game at that, was the ultimate conclusion to the Twins’ farewell season in the Metrodome.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. OK, who are we kidding? The Twins might eke out a victory when the series returns to Minnesota for game 3, but there’s almost no way the scrappy Twins can stand a chance against the formidable Yankees lineup.

The sad truth, though, is that there’s little sport in how the Yankees got to where they are. Unlike the NFL, Major League Baseball doesn’t have revenue sharing, ensuring that each team has the necessary resources (in theory… and leaving aside last year’s Detroit Lions for now) to field a solid team. The Yankees are in a league of their own, calling the country’s largest advertising market city home, charging four figures for some seats at Yankee Stadium, and in general bringing in quantities of cash that most other teams couldn’t even dream of, resulting in salaries for some individual players that are comparable to that of the entire roster of some smaller market teams. It’s as if the rest of the league is really AAA, and the Yankees are the only true “majors.”

Which, I suppose, is their right. I personally think revenue sharing is a smart idea, and it would keep the game a lot more interesting. Woo-hoo. The Yankees and the Red Sox and the Angels are all in the playoffs again. What a surprise. Maybe the feeble AL Central really does belong in AAA, but at least there’s some real competition, some real sport in it all. If the Yankees go on to sweep the Twins (likely), beat the Red Sox or Angels for the league championship (probably), and ultimately win the World Series (quite possibly), what does it really prove? Little more than that money is all that really matters in a game towards which the majority of the country is increasingly indifferent, for fairly obvious reasons.

Then again, as long as the Yankees can keep charging $2500 for seats, I doubt the decision-makers will really care. But for me, last night was what the game is all about.

Congratulations, Minnesota Twins, champion underdogs!

Update (October 11, 2010): OK, apparently MLB does have revenue sharing, but it might as well not.

I felt a bit bad, looking back at my last post. Depending on how you read it, it sounds like I’m describing the devastation of the environment and community of Centralia, PA as “random stuff I just love.”

That was hardly my intention, of course. Anyway, I’ll make amends by offering this link to the website for a new feature-length documentary on Centralia that was released this year, The Town that Was. I hope to see it soon.

It wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t find it on my own. Even the clever quip about it isn’t mine, but it’s just so good, I have to quote it verbatim from Wired: “What do you get when you pair random Family Circus cartoons with random Nietzsche quotes? I don’t know, but it’s a lot funnier than The Family Circus.”

And here it is.