Election Day in the United States is exactly three weeks away. I recently came across ElectionDay.org and was curious if any of the WordPress ecosystem giants had signed on (non-embedded Google Doc link here). Well they have not and I think it would be great to see Automattic, WP Engine, GoDaddy, Endurance (bluehost), and Deluxe (Hostopia and many more) take up the call. If you think this is about politics, it’s not, it’s about citizenship, and I feel that all voting eligible citizens should take every election seriously. Stepping off my tiny soapbox now. Thanks for listening.
Choices in Hosting: Nobody is Investing in the Future of WordPress
This is a great post about taking the WordPress ecosystem seriously and acting like your site’s life matters. Tom Fanelli writes, Nobody is Investing in the Future of WordPress: “WordPress can be vulnerable, slow and bloated. Badly written plugins cause problems for speed and security. Many businesses, agencies and freelance developers use low-quality hosts that don’t care about WordPress or its future. To solve these problems, as an industry, we should be investing in research and development (R&D).” Spot on. Tech doesn’t slow down for anyone, being vigilant and invested is the only way to improve all facets of security, performance, and reliability.
But. Yes there is a but. I have an issue with calling out cPanel for being a part of the problem. Tom continues, “cPanel is used as the default dashboard by many hosting companies, and yet it typically leaves website owners high-and-dry to face websites that suffer poor speed and security.” I could not disagree more. It’s like saying that because websites that are hosted on Linux infrastructure get “suffer poor speed and security” we should all move to hosting on Microsoft Azure. These infrastructure components are only as good as the people and companies implementing them.
More Choices in Hosting: SiteGround Drops WordPress from Support
MaAnna — it’s a southern name, pronounced May Anna — writing in BlogAid, SiteGround Drops WordPress from Support: “SiteGround built their business into what it is by advertising that it was great for WordPress users. Not only did they advertise servers that were tweaked for the best WordPress speed, they also finally got super call-in support that could handle most host and WordPress questions. In fact, that WP support is why their name was so often mentioned in blogger groups when someone asked for the best host to use. Well, that’s changed.” It’s and interesting read but a couple of things. First, I have to say I never even know that WordPress specific support was a benefit / luxury at SiteGround. I do personally know from past experience that support is a crazy focus. How many times have you submitted a ticket and gotten a call back in less than five minutes? It’s been a few years since I’ve used SiteGround but I do remember that. Second, with the huge growth in WordPress and variety of possible WordPress configurations, installs, plugins, etc. I really can’t blame a hosting company from focusing on maximizing their expertise on the hosting side and pushing WordPress support elsewhere. Heck there’s a whole ecosytem around that kind of support, GoWP, WP Buffs, Valet, and more.
Movers and Shakers
Congrats to Chris “Topher” DeRosia for moving to his new roll as Senior WordPress Architect at Camber Creative. Now, let’s get shaking at some fun and informative events happening now and coming up: WP Agency Summit is in progress all week, and WooSesh is today and tomorrow. As usual, keep your calendar up to date from the events page.