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Comment by joe_momma | Hacker News Reader

Popular for small to midsize businesses to do what? Blog? They don't need wordpress to sell items or create their brochure pages. If they need a blog wordpress is good for that but even something like Medium may be a better option. The day of putting everything under one roof is gone.

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Blogging is not the primary use of Wordpress in practice for small to medium sized businesses.

Please share their primary use that cannot be sufficed with a third party application or beyond a static page? Im curious as to what these are not being snarky

I think the use-case is a CMS where a non-technical user can post files, create/update pages of static information with a wysiwyg editor, and have it all Just Work without having to ever see a command line or deal with errors from some mystery-meat generator process that has a bunch of its own ideas about correctness, style consistency, or whatever else.

As a former user who had one of those typical personal Wordpress blogs on a shared hosting setup, I experienced the nightmare of dealing with spam, hacking, having to constantly upgrade, etc. So for my own use I would never consider anything other than a static site generator; but I can see the appeal for many use cases, especially if the backend is managed (services like WP Engine) or semi-managed (the guy who set it up is getting a small monthly fee to keep an eye on things).

I looked into WP Engine recently to see if I could transfer some older client websites, it's eye wateringly expensive!

I don't think it's meant to compete with DIYers or small-time bloggers— that market is covered by wordpress.com's paid plans, and value-add services on top of shared hosting, like what SiteGround offers.

My sense is that WP Engine targets busy professionals who have first-hand experience of how much hassle a WP installation can be to maintain, people for whom downtime or being hacked has potentially a severe cost in terms of lost business, reputational damage, etc. The other way to look at it is that $300/mo sounds like a lot for "just a WP installation", but it's peanuts compared to hiring another person for your IT department.

That's fair - however I've been hosting some of these sites since 2014 on bare metal VPS with minimal issues (the occasional upgrade breaking a theme). A lot of WP issues come down to server settings / bad plugins over WP itself. I suspect WP Engine is largely charging that much to support any WP setup no matter how insecure.

Their platform actually actively tries to prevent you from being insecure. They limit what plugins you can install with an ever growing blacklist, and they try to handle as much of the performance stack as possible to reduce attack vectors. You don't like their caching layer? Too bad.

You're also paying for decent support tech's and support availability. I think to this day you can call and a human will pick up the phone. Tech's are well versed in the WordPress ecosystem and many are developers who can help you troubleshoot things at the code level, whereas with some budget webhost, they'll tell you to pound sand and hang up (albeit more politely).

That said, I think these "premium" WordPress hosts are purely for non-devs or devs with no time to provide their own support. If you're a developer, there is no reason to pay that premium to keep your blog online. If you want a more managed solution, use something like ServerPilot or SpinUp WP, or any number of other service that will provide a thin maintenance layer on top of any garden variety VPS provider.

Still seems slow navigating the wordpress admin system though, maybe that's just Wordpress in general

One use case I had at a previous job was that they used word press for daily logs, inventory counts, hr portal, etc... Basically a form wrapper that would email the related departments with whatever the employees inputted.

Very simple and more then did the job. It costed basically nothing to use and pretty much anyone could maintain the site.

I could see a small company needing a quick and cheap way to make a portal. These are things wordpress should perhaps focus more on and move away from the blog being central, but still make it available.

Typically, it's because most of these businesses have some extra requirement. They need a brochure site + some complicated multi-step form, or some integration with a third party API. Wordpress is popular because if there is any platform for which there will be a turnkey plugin solution for these extra bits of functionality, it'll be wordpress.

The API will have an official plugin, or someone will have written one because their client needed it and the dev decided to support and sell it. Complicated forms can be turned out with plugins like Gravity forms.

This is why lots and lots of sites are still built on wordpress because the ecosystem around it lets people do a lot of stuff quickly without touching a line of code.

I could see the benefit of creating many forms or ones that frequently updated.

Maybe ecommerce or anything else, as it's also a bulletproof framework.

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