In reply to Donna.

Hi Donna,

I don't work for WPEngine, and I can't speak specifically to your customer service experiences, but I can tell you that infrastructure, cloud or otherwise, problems are something that every single hosting provider has to contend with. I can't think of a hosting provider, shared or otherwise, who can give you hosting for less than $50/month for a single site and do it on their own infrastructure that isn't rented/leased from somewhere else. You, as a person, could totally go get a dedicated server from somewhere like Hurricane Electric, and expect to pay several hundred bucks a month just for that server, and be in charge of maintaining the entire stack. Linode is having troubles now, and it's massive, but the same thing will happen to Amazon and any of the other big cloud providers. Sort of the nature of the beast.