alt Hacker NewsI was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name of “self hosting” was running their business on a 73 plugin WordPress site:
Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)
Replies
skydhash • today at 12:18 PM
If you need 73 plugins for wordpress, then Wordpress is a poor technology choice for your usecase.
em-bee • today at 12:45 PM
disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong, especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut them out.
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> Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds.
Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate the DOM after it loaded.
It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.
> Stop self hosting.
Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want to get going and don't have resources for this.