Readit Newszener79 commented on Show HN: HardyPress – Serverless static WordPress hosting hardypress.com?HN2... · Posted by u/zener79
First off, I really like your idea, however 2/3 of your main marketing points sounds a bit scary:
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?
Hi, and many thanks for your comment :-)
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!
zener79 commented on Show HN: HardyPress – Serverless static WordPress hosting hardypress.com?HN2... · Posted by u/zener79
Really cool, I’ve toyed with this idea before.
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
Yep, you get the point.
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.
zener79 commented on Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator hardypress.com/... · Posted by u/zener79
Sure, that's the front-end and the service you are providing, just the ability to use WP. Sure it's great that it's not "on" unless I'm editing or using it, but why not add an option to build/output the static to a user's Git account? I understand that may not be the market you are going after, however I don't think it will lose you any of the customers who just want an WP/hosting easy-button; it will just add the customer who know's what they are doing a little bit, can work with Git, and wants to host it where they want. I think you can only win by adding this as an option/feature..
Ok, about this we will release soon a new feature where users will be able to deploy their static site on a custom ftp/sftp server.
Adding a git repo as destination won't be a problem :-)
zener79 commented on Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator hardypress.com/... · Posted by u/zener79
Honestly think your business model would be improved by ditching the hosting, and have the static output just get git-synced, and working to incorporate the forms and such with something like Netlify which should support that, and Netlify has great workflows and integrations that you should be able to work with; or at least add the option of just pushing the static to Git/Netlify. Most of the value in what you are offering here is just in the headless (or WP front-end as a service shall we say) Wordpress component. I think a significant potential user base would much rather plunk down $5/mo to use the nice WP FE you've created, in conjunction with some type of Git/Netlify (or similar) integration, vs being locked in to having to host with you. Just my two cents. Believe others have weighed in similarly as well.
I see your point, but I also think that most of the value in what we are offering here is the ability to turn WordPress on/off on demand, so you can forget about it after the changes.
How could this be achieve without hosting files and DB?
I built LastSignal because I was uncomfortable trusting a third party with extremely sensitive information (final messages, recovery instructions, etc.).
LastSignal is a self-hosted dead man's switch: you prepare encrypted messages that are automatically delivered to chosen recipients if you stop responding to periodic check-ins.
Security-wise, the server is treated as untrusted by design:
- messages are encrypted client-side
- the server never sees plaintext
- the operator cannot decrypt stored data
I've documented the security model, threat assumptions, and known limitations here:
https://lastsignal.app/security/
Source code:
https://github.com/giovantenne/lastsignal
This is an early but usable version. I'm especially interested in feedback on the threat model, edge cases, and assumptions around liveness and delivery.
Happy to answer questions.