Show HN: HardyPress – Serverless static WordPress hosting
hardypress.com
hardypress.com
Unfortunately the challenge is interactive plugins. I’m skeptical of your solution to effectively build a white list of supported plugins. This will obviously be a dealbreaker for many sites.
Off the top of my head, here’s how I would solve it:
- The user hosts their “origin” WP site on a separate subdomain from the main site and leaves it running
- Your product scrapes from that subdomain. When it encounters any page with a form action, it rewrites the form action to point to the origin subdomain
- If it detects dynamic content on the page (not sure on best way to do this), or the request follows a form action, it registers a CACHE_MISS for the page and fetches it from the origin subdomain
Plugin support is a real challenge... anyway we are seriously building a white list of compatible plugins, and so far they are about 90% of the total. For the remaining 10% it is usually always possible to replace them with some external service (facebook-comments or disqus for comments, our Zapier app for mailchimp/drive/dropbox integration, beds24 as booking system, etc)
We also thought about something like your idea (keep a second installation live somewhere to submit the data), but, as you will have to host your real WP somewhere, you will lose one of the main benefits of HardyPress, namely to have your site unbreakable.
For your point about security, that could be solved by asking them to whitelist your resolver IPs at the origin. Or you could even host the “origin” for them, in a closed network.
1. Is your "Instant search out of the box" open-source? If so, could you point me to it without the need of setting up account?
2. How do you technically handle "Keep using plugins" on BE?
Are there any bigger clients which you could mention? Could you tell us some reason why should someone trust you with some "enterprise" WP since you are quite new hosting provider?
Currently the search engine we offer with HardyPress is very simple: we index the site content during the deploy process and we provide APIs to retrieve results (or you can use our native modal box with no additional coding).
You can read more about this here: https://www.hardypress.com/guides/hardypress-site-search/
Regarding plugins, currently about 90% of the plugin we reviewed are fully compatible, because the do not have any dynamic behavior on the frontend. If your site use some plugins marked as "incompatible", our system suggest you an alternative to replace the plugins behavior.
I perfectly understand your concern about HardyPress being a new "hosting provider", but HardyPress infrastructure is entirely built on the cloud, currently on Amazon AWS and the static generated sites are hosted on Amazon S3 Buckets that we use as pull-zones for the CDN, so your websites are really unbreakable and they'll stay up, no matter what!
You don’t need to trust us to feel safe!
If you want to have full control of your data you can always download your static generated site and host it somewhere else as your wishes. In this way you will use HardyPress only as a Static Site Generator plus the benefits that we will proxy your contact forms, and we'll make the search work!