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But with self-hosted Wordpress, especially with large number of plugins, you will have to constantly update your Wordpress installation or get hacked and spammed, no?

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Yes, but wordpress has implemented its own form of a "cron" which allows it to do self-updates. Basically every request spawns a "cron" request (literally a HTTP request to itself over localhost) to be processed asynchronously if it's been long enough since the last. And since a "proper" wordpress install can self-modify, it can thus self-update.

My knowledge is about 5 years old at this point, but the idea still scares me silly.

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