[have_faith]

I build a lot of Wordpress sites of all types of complexity, including sites that could benefit from being static. My main reasons for likely not using your service would be:

You become my new hosting company and that worries me. But more importantly, these 3 selling points "Support for Contact Forms 7", "Instant search out of the box", "Keep using plugins". I now have to vet plugins myself and guess if they are going to break in your system. It also makes me think about what I can or can't do when building themes myself which I usually don't have to do. The part about you injecting code into the site to add your own instant search is also worrying.

My main takeaway would be that your service is appropriate for novice users and maybe I'm not the target audience. But novice users might not know what static websites are or the differences between them and non-static sites and so I would market the service differently. Instead of focusing on technical features I would just sell it as a hosted Wordpress service with extra bells and whistles that make your sites faster than a normal host. The focus being fast, secure, ease of use, low maintenance etc and renegating the technical aspects about it being headless, generating static pages, WP running on a separate domain and so on to just a technical explanation page for users that are interested.

I hope I haven't dissuaded you, Good luck!

[zener79]

Many thanks for your thoughts :-)

Actually yes, we are a new hosting company, but the live site is hosted an a AWS-S3 bucket with a CDN in front of it, so, even if you don't trust us, I could feel quite safe with it.

In my personal experience, I used to have a web agency with dozens of WordPress installation to keep alive, mostly of them where simple “brochure” sites. I used auto-update mechanisms and caching layers provided by the hosting service, but it happened more than once to have security/performance/technical problems and headaches.

Only after I put the static copy of these sites online I started sleeping well at night. There was no way that things could go wrong.

Of course it is easier if you build them with the "static solution" in mind. Anyway you will find a compatibility list of the plugin you are using on the site dashboard once your site is on HardyPress.

[snowwrestler]

I too have self-hosted dozens of Wordpress sites over the years, including reverse proxy servers to terminate SSL and cache pages, and CDNs to mitigate DDOS and reduce roundtrip times.

I don't bother anymore. I think your biggest competition today isn't self-hosted Wordpress sites, it's Wordpress.com, WP Engine, Pantheon, GoDaddy Managed Wordpress, etc.

I don't want to seem negative, but I'm having a hard time seeing why I would prefer your system to those. From my perspective the static site generation + services adds complexity, it doesn't remove it. And I'd still have to maintain the Wordpress instance since it provides the backend.

If Wordpress is the backend, then a static copy, to me, just seems like one particular implementation of a caching strategy. I would not expect S3 to serve HTML pages any faster than Varnish, for instance.

[zener79]

Actually there are a couple of things that I'd like to clarify:

1) There is no WordPress backend to maintain as it doesn't exists unless you turn it on in a temporary/hidden/virtual environment to make your changes. For the rest of the time it simply doesn't exists. No PHP, no MySql, nothing that can break. You don't even need to keep your installation updated if you don't want to.

2) The pages are not served from an S3 bucket but from a CDN with 20 edge server around the world. The bucket is only a "source of true" where the CDN loads the files when the "cache" is invalidated. This reduce the TTFB (Time to first byte) up to 10x from any location respect a traditional hosting service.

[snowwrestler]

I think you've identified the right problems--security, pain of maintenance, performance. I don't think you're solving in them in the best way, but don't let that stop you! Hope your business is successful.

[IgorPartola]

Why can't you export the static site and let me host it myself?

[zener79]

There are already some plugins that "staticize" your website, but

1) you still need to have and maintain secure the WordPress Installation somewhere. With HardyPress WP can be paused and restored when needed with a click.

2) you have to download the static version and upload it somewhere else manually (your client certainly can't do it on their own). HardyPress does it with a click.

3) contact forms and search will stop working. With HardyPress, if you use CF7, everything will work seemlessy.

To solve the problems above HaryPress needs to hosts your WP installation.

[indigodaddy]

Honestly think your business model would be improved by ditching the hosting, and have the static output just get git-synced, and working to incorporate the forms and such with something like Netlify which should support that, and Netlify has great workflows and integrations that you should be able to work with; or at least add the option of just pushing the static to Git/Netlify. Most of the value in what you are offering here is just in the headless (or WP front-end as a service shall we say) Wordpress component. I think a significant potential user base would much rather plunk down $5/mo to use the nice WP FE you've created, in conjunction with some type of Git/Netlify (or similar) integration, vs being locked in to having to host with you. Just my two cents. Believe others have weighed in similarly as well.

[zener79]

I see your point, but I also think that most of the value in what we are offering here is the ability to turn WordPress on/off on demand, so you can forget about it after the changes.

How could this be achieve without hosting files and DB?

[indigodaddy]

Sure, that's the front-end and the service you are providing, just the ability to use WP. Sure it's great that it's not "on" unless I'm editing or using it, but why not add an option to build/output the static to a user's Git account? I understand that may not be the market you are going after, however I don't think it will lose you any of the customers who just want an WP/hosting easy-button; it will just add the customer who know's what they are doing a little bit, can work with Git, and wants to host it where they want. I think you can only win by adding this as an option/feature..

[csbartus]

I build a lot of non-Wordpress sites and even create my own framework because Wordpress lacks modern web dev features like static site generation / headless CMS.

I found the HardyPress approach a godsend. Finally a really fast hosting without the caching overhead.

And with Wordpress moving to the Gutenberg editor ie. enabling component based design and development this new combo will be a game changer.

For most of us the Wordpress backend is good enough. If the design / dev process and hosting is brought to the latest standards then we will have a modern framework which already runs 30% of websites today.