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It’s a good bet that at some point during any visit here you’ll notice that handsome devil, Will, The WordPress Helper. Will is was the mascot of The WordPress Helpers, formerly one of the sites in the PC-VIP family. Our web sites get about a thousand visitors most days, which is either a very big deal (it puts us well into the top 1% of all web sites in terms of raw traffic), or not at all (literally hundreds of thousands of sites get more).
During the time we ran The WordPress Helpers (get ready for The Website Helpers / The CMS Helpers, by the way), we sometimes had large spikes in our traffic, usually when news about our dealings with the WordPress mother ship hit the news. When that happened, we were REALLY glad we have our hosting under control. Generally, that thousand daily visitors doesn’t justify the amount of firepower we throw at content management hosting, but see a spike just once and you might reconsider the value equation behind inexpensive hosting from companies like GoDaddy.
Recently, a conversation on this topic popped up here. And as Mr. McFarlin—who’s one of the smartest WordPress Guys we know—pointed out, there’s no such thing as Perfect WordPress Hosting.
There’s also no such thing as perfect Content Management Hosting for any other CMS. And that’s where this gets tricky.
Content Management Hosting
The idea of “Content Management Hosting” is a good one, but ultimately one that won’t shouldn’t mean much of anything in practical terms. As you’ll see in the back-and-forth between Tom and myself in the comments on his article, until you have a very high level of traffic, there’s no need to be all that granular as you analyze content management hosting versus any other ‘type’ of hosting.
Yes, this means that if you’re running a business using $5/month shared hosting you’re always just an eyelash away from your website grinding to a halt, but that’s easily remedied; you can get dedicated hosting that requires no more management effort than shared hosting does for under $100/month, and there are any number of jumping off points in between five dollar and hundred dollar hosting. Contact us if you’d like some guidance.
Managing the minutiae behind issues like this one is what The Answer Guy does. And while we know you don’t want to be told to increase your web hosting expense by two thousand percent, we also know that running the entire back-end of your business for $5 isn’t a sustainable business strategy.
The point comes back to that word “minutiae”. To keep your business running, someone has to keep track of a lot of stuff. While that someone is often us and that’s how we make a living here, what’s more important is you understanding what you need to understand. “Content Management Hosting” shouldn’t be it.
At least, not the way that tweaking the subject as we were doing at Tom McFarlin’s blog suggests.
I was speaking with a client this morning who’s in the design business (he made Will The WordPress Helper), and he was asking what to do when a client who he’s built something for keeps asking him to tweak one of his designs. My answer was simple: if you’re getting paid appropriately it doesn’t matter. By this is a guy who’s suffering through The Creative Apocalypse; design, at least in the sense of what he’s done for a couple of decades, is dead. And what does that mean? Pretty much every web site being created today looks pretty much like every other one.
And your web site is your business, or at least it’s the primary way you explain yourself to the world before “real sales” starts.
“Content Management Hosting”? Not meaningful. “WordPress Hosting”? also unimportant if your WordPress site the server your WordPress site is on is managed the right way. And that’s dull. And it’s also the point. Farm out your back-office minutiae so you can focus all your attention on actually growing your business.
Now get back to work; you’ve got stuff to do.
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