Professional Hosting installers retired

If you login to your 34SP.com control panel this month, you might notice a small change to the interface. You’ll notice the one click installers previously provided with Professional Hosting are no more. We’ve made the decision to remove these based on a few factors.

Limited use

We routinely monitor the use of our installers and how clients are interacting with them. In our latest sampling of usage patterns we found that of the last 1,000 new accounts created only 4 users had actually used an installer. That’s a vanishingly low number compared to the amount of time we put into keeping them running.

Management and resources

It takes a non trivial amount of time to manage the installers. Are they up to date, are they secure, are we offering the best solution for the end needs of the user? The time saved by removing the installers is time we can put into services seeing the most engagement.

We know that some hosts purchase third party tools to offer installer packages that in turn offer hundreds of different installers. Our general preference is only to provide software we can expertly manage for our clients. And in truth…

The landscape of the web is changing

Isn’t it always? It’s increasingly uncommon to write/code a site by hand. Most users now turn to popular CMS platforms (notably WordPress). In case you wondered, our own stats show just 13% of our most recent users actually code their own sites by hand.

Looking back a decade ago, you might have written your own website by hand, perhaps using a formmail installer to integrate a contact form. Skip forward to today and the superior option is to lean on a free CMS like WordPress (installed as standard on our hosted WordPress platform) and use a free formmail plugin from the likes of Gravity Forms.

All of this combined means there’s little to no point in us continuing to maintain rarely used and rarely needed script installers.

But wait, err, what about…

Just drop us a line to support@34sp.com if you think there’s something we can deploy that will make life easier or simpler. We’ll still be looking to offer tools to simplify typical hosting experiences where we can; think of one click free SSL installations, or our tool to setup DNS for Office 365 or G Suite services with one click.

Finally, please note that our Professional Hosting plan remains a completely blank slate, free to use as you see fit. You can still go ahead and install popular LAMP compliant CMS tools like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal yourself, and as ever we’re happy to offer pointers if you get stuck.