Ask HN: The Ideal Hosting for WordPress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The Ideal Hosting for WordPress?

1 pointkapc04035 comments

We are developing a platform for WordPres that covers the areas of full test life, build and production environment. I don't want to be the typical cpanel hosting, no, I've been working on Cloupsy to integrate tools that all these years I've wanted and needed in one place.

I would like to know what features you think are necessary in the development process of your WordPress site that you would like to see in a cloud/hosting provider.

We already have some, you can check them out at cloupsy.com or try them directly at app.cloupsy.com/new

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Would it be possible to have a super hardened dev environment where we can build/test/write etc in a normal WP style but deploy to a static hosted version (better performance, security etc)?

something like different branches? One for development and then move it into production?

Must have? The ability to use Visual Studio Code + the remote server SSH extension. This effectively allows someone to do "local" dev on the remote server.

Why it matters:

1) Ease of spinning up a dev env, especially for larger (DB + media) sites. Every host has clone an env. Typically that's for staging. This is just added envs for "local" dev.

If that cloning-for-local-dev can automatically add things like wpcs, and PHPStan (or Psalm) and other such tools - with specific instructions how to update VSC that would be super helpful.

2) Privacy and security. This mitigates the devs' responsibility for any data on their local machine. Obviously privacy and security matter, even for WordPress ;) I've always been curious what GDPR's position is on such data. My hunch is, it's subject to the law. That is, for example, a request (read: click) to remove account should remove that data *everywhere*.

I mention the above because not all the major WP hosts support it. Afaik, WP Egine does not; Not sure about Pntheon but it's very opinionated so maybe not?? There might be others.

p.s. This would be magical...some premium plugins are licensed per domain. That is, prod is a license, staging is another, dev envs more licenses. If there was a way to set up some sort of proxy so for certain plugins the pings to the license auth'ing all look like the same domain / IP that would be a cool - and helpful - trick.

I'm not sure that's even possible but I figured it was worth mentioning.

----- Edit -----

It looks like you support a staging env. That's good, tho' as expected :) What's missing - I presume - is support for additional "local dev" clones.

Great your point of view, it certainly gives me more ideas, because if we are focusing a lot on having a development environment, but the vision you have is literally what every developer would like to have, so that gives me an idea to start implementing these additional things.

Exactly. It's a great DX. Once you do it, you don't want to go back.

I've been a more than one agency where someone would try to spin up and older project and it would take up to day or two when all said and done.

Then recently I was at an agency that used VSC+SSH and did the "local dev" envs on Digital Ocean. But most of the clients were on Kinsta so - to me - why even bother with DO? Just "local dev" on Kinsta, repos on Git*, etc.

The only thing I never figured out was how to do phpcs / wpcs via that VSC+SSH connection. I believe there's way but never dug into it. While PHPStan should be easier as it's a CL-based tool. But having a checklist of things I might want in the dev env and having the installs automated would be so so nice.

In any case, you get the point.

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