Hacker News Reader

It's a common business model and there are loads of companies that offer WordPress hosting with various management services to compete with WordPress.com

Companies take open source software and package up management, hosting, and consulting services. That's basically what Red Hat does, for example.

View on HN

This isn't a good example - WordPress.com doesn't offer the same product as other WordPress hosts. With the latter, you're still getting "self-hosted" WordPress, but with the former, you're getting one install added to their giant multi-site installation (and all the limitations that that imposes).

That's not true actually, the software that powers wordpress.com is builtin and can power many sites from the same instance.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

So while many hosters will offer a single instance (as it's more flexible), some, often companies doing it internally will use multisite just like wordpress.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com