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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculously expensive though. Almost $150/yr for what probably costs $5/yr to host.

Ridiculously cheap if you factor in the costs of time/effort spent learning to do it yourself when your primary focus is launching your jewelry making business.

Jewelry making businesses go to where the buyers are, which is Etsy. They could do Squarespace Ecommerce and work on SEO and PPC ads to drive traffic, but as you said, they might prefer to focus on making jewelry.

For me, it's not clear how Squarespace will be able to grow if their market is mom-and-pop shops. There are better economies of scale in targeting 1 enterprise accounts over 10 consumer accounts.

I hear you, but I feel like that ignores a lot of externalities to hosting a site for a client, including:

1. Support (fielding calls, answering emails, etc)

2. Updates (copy, design, patching)

3. Admin (billing, contracts)

And that's just off the top of my head. Having a client is rarely about just handling the hosting. You effectively become a technical resource and field all the duties that entails.

When your Wordpress site gets hacked and you pay someone $500 (if you are lucky) to fix it this flips pretty quickly. If your Wordpress site doesn't get hacked its because you manually maintain it, and time at most of my clients is worth more than that.

If you are on something that can't get hacked (static site) it is because you are a developer or at least pretty technical and the ease of use doesn't apply to you.

Again, this is all targeted at US (West Coast to be specific) SMB.

Automated backups exist for Wordpress.

If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.

In any case, if you have a mature website, it's going to be complicated to switch from WP to Squarespace and vice versa. But with WP you still have the flexibility to host wherever you want, on whatever you want.

All of this is 100% correct and if its easier / easy enough for you then that works. I wasn't really making the case that it was explicitly better for everyone, but it is awesome for my clients.

For backup, I either end up paying as much as Squarespace (WPEngine) or have to keep an eye on it to make sure its working.

I have no global stats on Wordpress hacks, of the clients I have running it (40???) I think probably 10 have been hacked. Zero have been hacked since moving to WPEngine (which is the first thing we do when we take over management), which is certainly something.

I'm not sure what the exact definition of mature website is, but I'm not sure it is that difficult. Certainly if you have 100s of pages, posts, articles etc. then it could / would take a while to make the move. At that point we're just talking about target market. Most of my clients have stopped posting tons of news / blogs because they were only doing it for SEO and it didn't really work anymore. In my world where sites have 25 pages with semi-limited complexity it just doesn't take long to move anymore.

I do certainly have clients with more complicated needs (member areas, ecommerce, etc.) but most of the time I just recommend they link out to that content and use another service (client portal in their main line of business app, shopify, etc.) rather than building it into their site.

>> If hacked sites were really that much of an issue, then WP wouldn't be as popular as it is for business sites.

Business owners have no idea how often they get hacked. They get hacked because business owners want a DIY approach and start installing plugins willy nilly without sandboxing and testing them, making their sites vulnerable to attack

September 2020:

Millions of WordPress sites are being probed and attacked with recent plugin bug

The sudden spike in attacks happened after hackers discovered and started exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in "File Manager," a popular WordPress plugin installed on more than 700,000 sites.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-of-wordpress-sites-ar...

That's a hell of a vector for a hacker. Target one plugin - hit over 700K machines? Unreal.

~1 year ago there was a zero-click (rce I think?) for easy smtp. At the time it was the most popular plugin for smtp setup on Wordpress, I can't imagine how many sites have that plugin installed without updates.

But they're not just hosting. A website shop will probably charge you a few thousand to build a site and then charge you again whenever you want changes. $150/yr just for that alone is a bargain to someone who cannot do it themselves.

Good luck finding decent hosting for $5/year, and hosting it yourself would cost more like $5/month (entry-level linode or something).

To be fair, building a static website and hosting on something like Azure Blob Storage Static Websites with an Azure Function for your contact form (or Azure Static Web Apps for both in one solution) would cost cents (pennies) a month have about the same maintenance fees, if you know what you're doing.

You're not going to have any support with that though and lacking the CMS part of it, and if you want to use any of the more advanced features like Ecommerce then you're going to have to spend a while building that.

I just spent more than $5/yr reading your comment.

$5/yr for a whole site is simply not worth even talking about. It's not relevant.

I have three dozen client sites (mom and pop businesses) running on Google App Engine that cost between $0.05 and $0.20 per month.

For low traffic sites that end up mostly just being object store and bandwidth, the public clouds are almost certainly the cheapest (from a computing bill perspective) way to do things. My personal website is similar.

The main caveat is that theoretically your costs could spike for some reason given you're paying based on usage. But if you're not doing anything complicated, I consider that pretty low odds.

Are you valuing your own time at all? At $150/year for a business that barely registers as an expense.

What expenses are you considering in that $5 though? Even so, keeping things running might be cheap, but its expensive to get to that stage. By the same token, it costs the same ~$50 to fill gas in a camry or a lambo.

$12 a month? Not really breaking the bank here man.

It's more of the principle. I don't like giving giving any company money, especially when there are cheaper alternatives.

I'm cheap when it comes to spending money on tech. I'm glad people are questioning the price.

We need more competition. It seems like we are just giving into the bigger companies, and I don't see the innovation I saw a few years ago.

You want more competition, but you don't want to pay anyone? How is that going to work, exactly?

If you refuse to pay for anything, to won't get innovation.

I'm sorry but this is ludicrous. We're talking about a high-quality website designer here. $12 a month is extremely reasonable.

Don’t confused the cost of production with the value to the user.

(Fwiw I tried squarespace and found the UX awful)

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