
Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator - zener79
https://www.hardypress.com/
======
have_faith
I build a lot of Wordpress sites of all types of complexity, including sites
that could benefit from being static. My main reasons for likely not using
your service would be:

You become my new hosting company and that worries me. But more importantly,
these 3 selling points "Support for Contact Forms 7", "Instant search out of
the box", "Keep using plugins". I now have to vet plugins myself and guess if
they are going to break in your system. It also makes me think about what I
can or can't do when building themes myself which I usually don't have to do.
The part about you injecting code into the site to add your own instant search
is also worrying.

My main takeaway would be that your service is appropriate for novice users
and maybe I'm not the target audience. But novice users might not know what
static websites are or the differences between them and non-static sites and
so I would market the service differently. Instead of focusing on technical
features I would just sell it as a hosted Wordpress service with extra bells
and whistles that make your sites faster than a normal host. The focus being
fast, secure, ease of use, low maintenance etc and renegating the technical
aspects about it being headless, generating static pages, WP running on a
separate domain and so on to just a technical explanation page for users that
are interested.

I hope I haven't dissuaded you, Good luck!

~~~
zener79
Many thanks for your thoughts :-)

Actually yes, we are a new hosting company, but the live site is hosted an a
AWS-S3 bucket with a CDN in front of it, so, even if you don't trust us, I
could feel quite safe with it.

In my personal experience, I used to have a web agency with dozens of
WordPress installation to keep alive, mostly of them where simple “brochure”
sites. I used auto-update mechanisms and caching layers provided by the
hosting service, but it happened more than once to have
security/performance/technical problems and headaches.

Only after I put the static copy of these sites online I started sleeping well
at night. There was no way that things could go wrong.

Of course it is easier if you build them with the "static solution" in mind.
Anyway you will find a compatibility list of the plugin you are using on the
site dashboard once your site is on HardyPress.

~~~
snowwrestler
I too have self-hosted dozens of Wordpress sites over the years, including
reverse proxy servers to terminate SSL and cache pages, and CDNs to mitigate
DDOS and reduce roundtrip times.

I don't bother anymore. I think your biggest competition today isn't self-
hosted Wordpress sites, it's Wordpress.com, WP Engine, Pantheon, GoDaddy
Managed Wordpress, etc.

I don't want to seem negative, but I'm having a hard time seeing why I would
prefer your system to those. From my perspective the static site generation +
services _adds_ complexity, it doesn't remove it. And I'd still have to
maintain the Wordpress instance since it provides the backend.

If Wordpress is the backend, then a static copy, to me, just seems like one
particular implementation of a caching strategy. I would not expect S3 to
serve HTML pages any faster than Varnish, for instance.

~~~
zener79
Actually there are a couple of things that I'd like to clarify:

1) There is no WordPress backend to maintain as it doesn't exists unless you
turn it on in a temporary/hidden/virtual environment to make your changes. For
the rest of the time it simply doesn't exists. No PHP, no MySql, nothing that
can break. You don't even need to keep your installation updated if you don't
want to.

2) The pages are not served from an S3 bucket but from a CDN with 20 edge
server around the world. The bucket is only a "source of true" where the CDN
loads the files when the "cache" is invalidated. This reduce the TTFB (Time to
first byte) up to 10x from any location respect a traditional hosting service.

~~~
snowwrestler
I think you've identified the right problems--security, pain of maintenance,
performance. I don't think you're solving in them in the best way, but don't
let that stop you! Hope your business is successful.

------
dberhane
Gatsbyjs (reactjs based static site generator) is a very good free
alternative. It has a plugin which allows you to use WordPress as a headless
CMS to create/update content and another plugin which allows to push your the
WordPress content to Github Pages (Gitlab or other static site hosting
services):

[https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/examples/usin...](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/tree/master/examples/using-
wordpress)

------
alok-g
Simply Static is an alternative for self-hosting:
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-
static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)

I'm learning how to then put the static site on a CDN. Are there tools for
that, or I would be using just FTP. Thanks.

~~~
kingkool68
You could just put a CDN in front of WordPress and presto change-o your site
is static.

~~~
alok-g
Could I use a CDN plugin (I found yours in a comment) in the Wordpress
development environment itself? (I won't be hosting Wordpress live in
production, only the static pages.) Thanks!

------
superasn
This concept is very good. Kudos.

One of my scariest memories of getting hacked (back when I was a total
greenhorn and cloud computing was rare) was hosting Wordpress blog on the same
server as our main site. It got hacked bad. We had viagra links in all our
files and it was a total nightmare to cleanup. Upon research I found out that
there is an entire market of people trying to find WP hacks and sell it
online. God knows how big it must be now.

Anyway, thankfully now you can just host your WP blog on an EC2/DO instance
and eliminate all risks. But always keep your WP database and instance
separate is what I learned from that.

------
pascalxus
Great Idea! I haven't tried it yet, but This is really awesome in concept.

Also, you may want to alleviate some people's concerns about using plugins.
The first thing that comes to my mind, would all my existing plugins still
work. You'd probably have to try it out and do a test.

------
caio1982
Nice idea, I hope it succeeds! However I would never move my critical WP stuff
to a new unknown hosting, thanks. If it was some sort of plugin or special
setup I could "install" on my servers I would really pay a decent amount for
it though, it would be ideal IMHO.

------
everdev
This looks exciting. As much as I dislike WordPress, it's here to stay and
clients ask for it by name.

This sounds like a nice compromise for those that want a GUI to make content
changes but also want the security and performance advantages of a static
site.

~~~
Veen
It's a nice idea for novices, but there are WordPress plugins that can create
static sites from WordPress installations.

~~~
zener79
Yes, there are some plugins that "staticize" your website, but

1) you still need to have and maintain secure the WordPress Installation
somewhere. With HardyPress WP can be paused and restored when needed with a
click.

2) you have to download the static version and upload it somewhere else
manually (your client certainly can't do it on their own). HardyPress does it
with a click.

3) contact forms and search will stop working. With HardyPress, if you use
CF7, everything will work seemlessy.

To solve the problems above HaryPress needs to hosts your WP installation.

~~~
huxflux
And pay you money :)

~~~
zener79
Yep, like for every hosting solution ;-)

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jasonshen
Congrats on the launch! Love the idea of speeding up WP sites via static
pages. Do we need to transfer our domain to you as well or just the Wordpress
installation?

Just posted to PH as well -
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardypress](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardypress)

~~~
zener79
Many thanks Jason for your effort on posting it on ProductHunt.

We were thinking of postponing the launch on PH when the new version of the
site is ready, but that's okay :-)

You don't need to transfer the domain to us (we are not registrar), you just
need to set a CNAME when your site on HardyPress is production ready

------
kingkool68
I scratched my own itch and made a plugin that enables you to put your entire
WordPress site behind a CDN and manages intelligently flushing the cache.

[https://github.com/kingkool68/wordpress-cdn-
integration](https://github.com/kingkool68/wordpress-cdn-integration)

------
sondh
How safe is this in comparison to running WordPress in a container with all
uploads go to S3 for example? WordPress provides ready to use Docker images
which should be fairly easy to upgrade. Sure, it's not for the novice users...

~~~
zener79
There is huge differences between running a live WordPress site on a docker
container (where you still have php, mysql, etc), and running it as a static
site in a serverless environment.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Is anyone using it and can comment on stability and potential issues?

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
OK so I set up a test account an things are mostly fine, although there are
still rough edges. For example, onece the static site is deployed and you
click Login in the default theme, you get:

> error on line 12 at column 10: Opening and ending tag mismatch: meta line 0
> and head

This is after two first minutes, so I guess there are still things to work on.
In any case, for more advanced users your product is a great no-no, since the
main advantage of WP is that it's FOSS - who would want to become your
hostage? I see a lot of potential for an open source solution, the idea is
really good.

~~~
guitarbill
> since the main advantage of WP is that it's FOSS

Maybe, maybe not anymore. Now the main advantage of WP is that it's
ubiquitous/low barrier to entry and has (too) many plugins/themes/etc
available.

Incidentally, that's also WP's main disadvantage because those things greatly
increase it's attach surface.

------
dotBen
What is the value of using this over a service like WP Engine
([http://wpengine.com](http://wpengine.com))?

------
indigodaddy
Are comments integrated in this system?

~~~
zener79
You can use some external service like Disqus, Discourse or similar.

~~~
csbartus
What about Wordpress.com/ Jetpack comments? Live commenting the Wordpress way
would be wonderful

------
huxflux
Could anyone make a list of free-alternatives? Tiresome seeing every little
idea turning into a 5 USD a month SaaS-startup.

~~~
guitarbill
Free alternative: Host WP yourself? Use a different static site generator?

Come on, this clearly isn't yet-another-static-site generator for hackers but
a commercial product for people who still use Wordpress, but not so
foolish/desperate/cheap that they don't realise the security implications.

~~~
harlanji
There are a couple of free plugins to make WP sites static, using various
methods. So yes, use a plugin and you can get an HTML copy of your WP site
with caveats that should make sense, and you can then host the html
anywhere... there are 2-3 plugins that I saw, but I don't run a WP site so I
can't comment on each.

This product looks like it'll do ops and stuff for you, so there may still be
value if it just works.

~~~
zener79
Actually with those plugin you still have some drawback: first you still need
to have and maintain secure the live WordPress installation somewhere, second
you have to download the static version and upload it somewhere else, last but
not least your contact forms and search will stop working.

