New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Why do you think nobody is doing it? It's not very viable.
Because they're not experts in WP. They're marketing an otherwise general web hosting as WP friendly. Which makes the service also not viable.
It's a special market, like the game hosting market. A Battlefield admin wants a host that understands how to work the Battlefield specific APIs, and works with EA to get the best service, not someone just selling slots and not caring how many sardines they pack into a box.
I was recently reading an article from a French coding/dev blog I follow, ran by two cool and funny guys working in webdev/sysadmin.
In that post, they said they had considered switching from their current WordPress installation to a static site generator (e.g. Jekyll, Pelican, etc). Then they explained the latter would not nearly be on par with WordPress, and they wrote a list about all the features that a blog platform should have if it were to compete with WordPress. Here it is (Google Translate):
A platform that makes blog shaarly + + microblogging.
The editor looks like ghost, but assumes that the guy at the controls knows what he does (it does not prevent iframes, sensitive HTML, etc).
Same publisher for articles, links and microblogs.
If less than 140 chars => Automatic microblog post it. Cross posted on twitter or another.
First line is a link => shaarly. Otherwise it is an article.
No categ only tags: # microblog, # link, # section and those that the author met. No complicated thing, it's just put tag # word in the body of the post. # Tag link automatically to a list of posts with these tags.
A search engine that is not useless.
Integrated and effective anti spam.
Everything is in Markdown, even the comments. Possibility of an @ mention in the comments, as in Discourse
Feed for all tags, comments, research ...
Every page is visible in JSON.
API JSON post.
API migration / synchronization blog from one server to another in JSON. If you want to change provider, you can just setup a new blog, the linker to the previous, and wait for it to sync, then switch the domain.
Versioning articles and comments.
Code versioning blog, including manual mods themes.
Cron jobs built for long operations.
Cache memory built in so that we can survive without having to sebsauvage varnish.
Auto regular backup.
Static dump blog automatically generated and available for download.
All items are in Markdown and download here in PDF.
A "Say thank you" button at the bottom of the blog that opens a modal window. Flattr offers, bitcoin, gittip, of personal relationships, and just a "thank you just say" button that makes a notif in admin. No need to leave a comment for that, but it lifts your spirits.
A share button that opens a modal with all buttons sharing social networks. If you do not click on it, they are not loaded or visible.
A button "submit improved" that allows players to change the product (eg to correct spelling), and receives the diff in the admin you can merge. If we merge, a line crediting the reader in the comments.
A system of external resources (images, videos, etc.) that can put a source link at the hover. If you give the URL of the resource, the metadata are automatically pullées. Otherwise, you can manually tag the resource. Can effectively search all resources and example to answer a question like "Is what I already posted this?"
A decent picture upload form that allows DL from a URL or disk and change the image inplace to make crops, Rotates, etc..
A network among all blog users who can add and follow like diaspora.
An integrated mobile version.
An integrated PDF reader and video.
The autocompletion everywhere.
Multilingual articles.
An integrated chat, discreet, with autocompletion on blog posts, a quota system, to embed media, etc..
Form a clean contact, simple, that works.
Rights system integrated yet simple to manage contributors.
An internal system for how all admin pages and articles. Seriously, why is not standard everywhere?
An internal chat.
Articles may be edited by colaboratif mode as in EtherPad instead of overwriting each other's mouth.
No unnecessary features such as a search field in page (seriously, WordPress, CTRL + F what is it?)
Or spellchecking (ghost, my browser is already doing, my publisher has already done, Open Office already does, and it makes no difference).
The blog can be installed as follows: DL, unzip, run. Nothing else to do.
A scrap book built to put the resources you want to use for future publications.
Integrated Basic Analytics.
Easy editing in browser themes. With a decent editor, ACE type and management with versioning and rollback diff.
Console that provides a shell code giving access to the blog, the database, etc.. Typically on a blog in Python, it would be a remote IPython with ORM preloaded. For all those times I wanted to do something that one shot WordPress not allowed and would have been so easy to do by hand. Obviously, could only work if SSL is enabled or you installed a browser extension to the RTO as pure JS is death.
When Delimiter went into trials last month with their automated application provisioning, we found that the #1 most installed application was Wordpress.
The idea of the platform is that you can take one of their dedicated server, rather than installing the OS, you install Wordpress Image which setups Wordpress with OS and php, etc so you have a ready to go Wordpress server in 3-4 minutes.
They added about 50-60 others apps, but nevertheless Wordpress tops the chart by a long stretch
I wish I could switch too, but without the addon/module development that comes from a popular platform, it's too costly to get that customization done for your site (even if you did code it yourself). Half the battle is content creation, the other is creating your website itself. It's why folks are using WP, it saves money on development which can be used on advertizing and bling to make the money.
It's a special market with special needs. Worst served are those seeking a new home off the WP site, because there they got expert help. In the general web host market there's but a few hosts with that expertise for one platform, and it's a hair pulling exercise to have a site run well (especially these days with Smartpowering and severely limiting burst and I/O transfers).
It's like fully managed VPS services. There's a reason KnownHost and WiredTree's prices are where they are - that's the cost of providing 24x7 service. There are no good $10/month managed VPS providers for a reason.
No it's not. That's 24/7 hand holding. What I'm referring to is setting up the account, not just giving a client a bare bone welcome. Some of these low end hosts don't even help in transferring a site or setup the DNS. -_-
And some goes the extra mile for their customers.
Lately I've had an increase in tickets and by no means I do the work for my customers, I tell them where and how they should do it so it works in their favour.
Maybe if you get a team of people so you can manage 24/7 and instead of wp management you could do all cms management or even better develop your own cms therefore you can make it more of where you build your clients site and then host it ?
I answered no, but bunch of tech/server lunatics may not be the best place to do research. Bloggers don't necessarily have to be techy; so they go for managed services. You should do your research among bloggers I guess. Some people I know opened up a journalism blog, they are couple of journalists trying to get into the new media stuff, not they're not techy. They don't have the resources to hire an IT staff etc. So they went for a managed WP hosting service. Updates and security patches are made for them automatically, there are some themes included etc. So some audiences want managed WP, but probably not here.
What I'd like to point out is that it's not a good idea to manually manage WP sites as a service. It's not sustainable when you have a large customer base. Professional managed WP hosts use in-house developed systems, somewhat similar to the idea of the former WPMU; but seperate installations are much more independent, only sharing some core. I don't think you can keep up with that. I'm talking about hosts like WP Engine.
This, IMO, is where one of the bigger markets may lie -- both for small community papers trying to get online beyond a Facebook page and individual journalists -- but you need to be competent and have a reliable product.
http://www.schoolnewspapersonline.com/ is an example of a WP host like that - they market heavily at high school/college papers and have some unique plugins and layouts that set them apart from other managed hosts. The sites themselves, I believe, are hosted on Rackspace Cloud servers.