Ask HN: Do you think that WP devs are ready for a PaaS?

[mindgap]

we built a PaaS for WordPress and i'm seeing that, despite good tries with web acquisition, the most performant acquisition source is still the offline sales to the webagencies.

Do you think that devs on wp are just not yet ready with PaaS? Or maybe it could be just due to that a PaaS often requires GIT, what you think?

[matthiaswh]

I obviously don't know enough about your service or your marketing efforts to say why you are having trouble with acquisition. But the need for a PaaS for WordPress seems to be a very niche one right now. Most sites built on WordPress are blogs or small business websites with very little traffic. For these, a $50/year shared hosting account is sufficient (even if everyone on HN loves to hate on shared hosting). If they need more and have the tech savvy to do it, a $5/mo VPS is good. And if they need more but don't have the tech savvy, a $10-$100/mo premium WordPress host gets the job done.

There are more and more people attempting to build complex applications on top of the WordPress architecture. Tools like WP CLI, Capistrano, Composer, Grunt, etc. - these are just starting to carve out their foothold in the WP dev stack. I imagine in the next 2-3 years the need for something like a WP PaaS will grow.

[chc]

There are already WordPress PaaS offerings that I'm pretty sure are doing OK for themselves, such as WPEngine. It might be worth looking at what they're doing.

[franklaemmer]

WP is not really a 12-factor app. so i guess it depends on your PaaS. in general bottom up, dev-to-dev, not top-down (sales, business relations …) works for us — i am co-founder of fortrabbit (PHP as a Service).

i think "GetPantheon" is doing a good job for professional WP hosting. wp-engine also. …

[mindgap]

thank you Frank for sharing this.

[mindgap]

quite interesting answers, thank you.