Static WordPress hosting alpha

They say everything comes back into style eventually, and the hosting world is no different. When we started hosting simple shared websites way back in October 2000 (nearly two decades ago!), it was very common for the sites we hosted to be simple static affairs; basic raw HTML sites crafted in nothing more exotic than Windows’ Notepad. CSS wasn’t even a thing back then…

Skip forward all those years and developments and the modern web landscape is vastly different. Today, CMS’s power most (non-proprietary hosted) websites with WordPress being the reigning champion of the popular platforms.

When WordPress launched as a fork of b2/cafelog in 2003 it started life as little more than a blogging tool. The intervening 16 years mirrored the evolution of the web – turning the system into a complex content publishing and management platform and that evolution brought growth in the platform’s codebase. As a result, speed and security have become increasingly pressing matters for some website developers.

So what if we could have our proverbial WordPress cake and eat it without the security and performance concerns too? Well, thanks to static hosting, that’s completely possible. What’s old is new again.

Static hosting is essentially serving up your website as simple flat files. That means no PHP, no AJAX, no database calls. Your site is served as plain raw HTML and CSS. In doing so there’s nothing for attackers to exploit; no cross site scripting flaws, no database holes to insert nasty code, no poorly written plugins to delve into. Nothing.

Moreover plain HTML is fast. There are no heavy JS libraries to deploy, no tortuous script to execute. It’s like taking a time machine back to the simpler days of 2000 – except this time we have wayyyy better connectivity to leverage than 56kbps modems to access our sites.

The point of all this rambling? We’ve now added a static hosting feature to our WordPress Hosting plans. First and foremost this needs to be manually activated by our support team; it’s only suitable in certain use cases. Next up, for now the feature is provided only in an alpha testing state; don’t use this on any mission-critical production website.

The static hosting feature on our WordPress Hosting lets you build your site and content within the WordPress CMS, and then push it out to the web as simple flat file HTML. The fastest and most secure way to host sites.

It goes without saying this feature is only for advanced users for the time being. There are a lot of ifs, buts and maybes in using static hosting and it’s important you know what you’re getting into before asking for this feature to be enabled. Our WordPress team will happily talk through the feature with you.

We’ll be working closely with the users of our static hosting feature over the coming months and seeing how we can improve and evolve the system for more general use. With some feedback and interest we’re hoping to eventually launch this is a complete feature on all WordPress hosting plans in the not-too-distant future.