I’m proud to say I’ve never missed a WordCamp in Portland. Ever since being “tricked” into attending the first event to sponsoring one as an individual to last weekend’s WordCamp US I have been at every single event. They’re always a blast, and I leave each event inspired and moved to do something big.
This year was no different. Except, having been more or less absent from the WordPress community for the past 8 or so years, my inspiration comes from an entirely new perspective.
A Power User at Heart
WordPress was effectively how I learned to code. It’s the project through which I finally understood version control. Where I learned database structures. What got me excited about command line tooling and interfaces. It’s also how I first experienced Linux and learned about the beauty of containerization for running discrete workloads in isolation.
While I don’t work professionally with WordPress today, I still use the tool frequently.1My blogging activity has almost exclusively been through WordPress. This site is hosted with the tool. While my older work lives in Jekyll, I might migrate it here to simplify domain sprawl as well. My tech background means I also have pretty niche opinions when it comes to how WordPress behaves and, admittedly, sets me up as a bit of an outlier when talking to hosts. I don’t want or need simple, shared hosting. But I’m also not willing to pay the extraordinarily high prices for a more feature-complete managed host.
I’m a power user of the platform, and I know enough about both software and system hardware to manage things myself.
Which means I felt a bit bad for the reps from Siteground and Hostinger who tried to warn me away from hosting this blog myself. “No one hosts a blog from their house,” one told me. “Once you write something popular, you’ll be under attack and need someone who understand security to fix it,” said another. I nodded along and calmly explained I wasn’t their target customer and thanked them for the time.
The State of Hosting
To be honest, I haven’t given the state of WordPress hosting much thought since I first moved my site from WP Engine to an EC2 instance over a decade ago. I’ve gone through budget shared hosting, expensive VPS setups, and various “managed WordPress” offerings. None really fit my use case, though, as a writer. And none made me happy as an engineer who could see how the sausage was made, either.
On the one hand are budget solutions meant to target as many passive customers as possible. Limited hardware, limited features, and the hope that the host knows what they’re doing with patch application for WordPress, PHP, and the underlying host.2A basic WordPress plan with BlueHost runs $2.95/month but doesn’t include backups! Siteground does a bit better at $2.99/month and even includes WP-CLI access. Hostinger also weighs in at $2.99/month but requires a 4-year contract. On the other hand are expensive solutions with full sysadmin access that require either a dedicated engineer or an even more expensive support subscription.3WP Engine’s managed “Core WordPress” package with isolated resources starts at $400/month.
There appear to be very few options in the middle of the road.
The Art of the Possible
Having built sites and servers for years now, I know what it takes to build a stable, secure, and performant system. I know the hardware cost. I know the software configuration. I’ve been on-call for ongoing monitoring so I’m well aware of the human cost of keeping the system up and alive.
The shared hosts are a race to the bottom – they’re commodity pricing pretending to be something they’re not.
The managed/isolated hosts are massively overpriced because the providers don’t understand how to actually build, manage, or maintain the system.4Their systems work, to be sure. But they’re not built for WordPress. They’re general-purpose application environments that just happen to be hosting WordPress. It’s overengineering for flexibility’s sake and far more expensive than is reasonable for what they claim to do.
As I was recounting some of these observations to a colleague during WordCamp US he just shook his head. “Really, you need to work at one of these companies – or maybe start your own – to have any kind of impact in this space.”
The Future of Hosting
None of these companies are the future of WordPress hosting. They all want to be, but again they’re all commodity plays. Every single vendor claimed to be the best or the fastest or the most innovative. But, after talking to a rep at every booth – I can’t tell you what makes them different other than the color of the socks they were giving away as swag.
At its core, a basic WordPress site consists of 5 things:
- A stateless PHP engine defining WordPress itself as well as the plugins and theme that make the site unique
- A stateful MySQL database hosting the site’s content
- A stateful filesystem hosting static assets (i.e. images and other media)
- Maybe a key-value store like Memcached or Redis to help offload some heavier database queries or HTML fragment generation
- A front-end webserver for handing TLS termination and request routing (i.e. serving static assets or forwarding requests to the PHP engine)
It’s possible to handle all of these on shared infrastructure in a secure fashion. And doing so removes the need for any limits on requests per month (which seems to be one of the going metrics for evaluating modern shared hosting). It’s also possible to avail these systems, in a resource-isolated yet autoscaling fashion on hardware far less expensive than $400+ per month.
The vendor conversations last week felt exactly like those I had at WordCamps and other events a decade ago. There has been next to zero evolution or advancement in the state of the art since then. Drama aside, it’s perhaps long past time for a new breed of host in the WordPress space.
Or at least, a refined approach to hosting WordPress projects in general.
- 1My blogging activity has almost exclusively been through WordPress. This site is hosted with the tool. While my older work lives in Jekyll, I might migrate it here to simplify domain sprawl as well.
- 2A basic WordPress plan with BlueHost runs $2.95/month but doesn’t include backups! Siteground does a bit better at $2.99/month and even includes WP-CLI access. Hostinger also weighs in at $2.99/month but requires a 4-year contract.
- 3WP Engine’s managed “Core WordPress” package with isolated resources starts at $400/month.
- 4Their systems work, to be sure. But they’re not built for WordPress. They’re general-purpose application environments that just happen to be hosting WordPress. It’s overengineering for flexibility’s sake and far more expensive than is reasonable for what they claim to do.
