Show HN: HardyPress, zero-maintenance, “static” Wordpress hosting service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HardyPress, zero-maintenance, “static” Wordpress hosting service

hardypress.com

41 pointssteffoz20 comments

There are lots of WordPress maintenance services [1] out there, but they're quite expensive. We remove the maintenance/upgrade problem altogether staticizing your WordPress sites and putting them on a CDN. The real WordPress installation lives on a separate domain and only runs when an editor needs to make some changes to the content. And it's totally seamless for visitors and your editors.

[1]: https://underconstructionpage.com/wordpress-maintenance-serv...

Brilliant idea. I'm really surprised there aren't more services like this as it seems such a logical idea that the admin/editor functionality of your site should be completely locked down and separate to the site serving the content. When making static sites, I've been looking for something with the flexibility of WordPress but there really isn't much out there. Good luck!

Do you allow custom plugins and templates? For the static generation part, how do you stop sites being too big or computationally expensive to generate?

Thanks! As long as plugins don't have any front-facing dynamic components, you're good to go! Templates are freely editable just like regular hosting services. For the static generation, it's really fast also for medium-sized Worpress sites. We are also trying make the process differential (partially, at least) :)

fascinating - can you still use the backend wp-admin? I've experimented with generating static HTML files with WordPress in the past, but the code has always came out a tad sloppy. This looks really cool, I might be interested in a trial.

edit: nevermind, found this:

https://www.hardypress.com/how-it-works/

again, really fascinating. has it been shown to reduce load times? Can I still minify my own CSS and JS, and "combine external resources?"

is their a public facing demo available?

Hi Patrick, I just saw you comment :-)

You can try the service for free, all you have to to is signup here: https://app.hardypress.com/register

I wonder if it could really work as advertized... how many problems could be found making a static website, even on a medium size WP? And what about dynamic content such as comments, search, filters or other specific plugins?

That's an great question. Most WordPress websites are just "brochure websites": they don't expose anything dynamic to their visitors excluding comments, contact forms and search functionality. We already handle these scenarios out-of-the box. Also, every plugin you use that does not have any front-facing components, it's perfectly fine. It's not a hosting solution for every possible WordPress website out there, but it can handle a huge slice of the market, with big benefits for agencies/freelances.

Having supported (from an infra/ops point of view) several places that insisted on using Wordpress, I don't understand why Varnish in front of <choose your web server[1]> isn't the standard 'recommended' way of hosting it.

1: it isn't going to matter. When the WP PHP is doing 30 different SQL queries just to load the front page of the site, your web server is no longer the bottleneck, even if it's Pre-Fork Apache with mod_php.

Using Varnishis a huge boost in performance for sure, but it doesn't solve vulnerability and maintenance problems

While a 'static' export of the site does solve the vulnerability issue (assuming it is a static export, and not just exporting to something else which could be vulnerable), I imagine lots of organisations would choose not to use it, specifically because some dynamic functionality won't work then.

For those who aren't able/willing to use a fully static version of the site, Varnish (or Apache Traffic Server, Squid, or Apache or Nginx's Cache mode) can provide a huge improvement in performance, and (definitely with Varnish and a custom VCL, possibly not as easy with others) can even handle stuff like grace mode (i.e. return cached, expired results if the origin is offline) and purging cached objects when they're updated in the WP DB (via a plugin which communicates with Varnish).

Im not sure what you mean about maintenance problems?

As Steffoz said below:

"Most WordPress websites are just "brochure websites": they don't expose anything dynamic to their visitors excluding comments, contact forms and search functionality. We already handle these scenarios out-of-the box. Also, every plugin you use that does not have any front-facing components, it's perfectly fine. It's not a hosting solution for every possible WordPress website out there, but it can handle a huge slice of the market, with big benefits for agencies/freelances."

Maintenance problems are those you have when you need to update your installation but you can not because the update break stuff around. I had lots of these :-)

> Most WordPress websites are just "brochure websites"

Thats possible for the overall majority of WP users, it just isn't what I've seen it used for.

> Maintenance problems are those you have when you need to update your installation but you can not because the update break stuff around.

How does this service solve that problem? Or do you mean, it allows you to not update immediately to patch a vulnerability, because the site is not the one publicly accessed?

> it allows you to not update immediately to patch a vulnerability, because the site is not the one publicly accessed?

Exactly. You can never update a vulnerable plugin if you don't want to.

Right. Doesn't this just make your "admin" site the target then?

The "admin" lives in a random-generated subdomain, is basic-auth protected and is alive only for the time needed for the editor to make the changes through the dashboard. For the rest of the time WordPress simply doesn't exist.

brilliant

This is a great idea. WordPress had a fantastic ecosystem and frankly a hell of a lot easier to use than Jekyll and friends. But it's security vulnerabilities are it's downfall do this is a nice solution.

Another cool service you could offer would be a "CloudFlare" type thing over and existing WP site, where you cache all the content.

Very useful and simple tool!. Good job.

Just a curiosity, which CDN are you using?

BunnyCDN [1], they're one of the few CDN with one-click SSL setup and instant cache purge

[1]: https://bunnycdn.com/

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