72 – A new way doing hosting (really) with Claudio Benvenuti from HardyPress

In this episode:

Discussion – Do plugin adverts annoy you? – [4:10]

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Interview – A new way doing hosting (really) with Claudio Benvenuti from HardyPress – [26:09]

Ending Fact – SERPs – [1:00:15]

On the podcast today we’ve got Claudio Benvenuti from HardyPress, a company who do hosting your WordPress site a little differently. Yeah, I know, what could be THAT different, well HardyPress could be!

The normal hosting environment for WordPress usually involves a LAMP stack of some kind and that’s about it. It’s more complex as that as we all know, but that’s your basic level and it goes up from there. The amount of money that you spend buys you things like more bandwidth in a month, more hard disk space, and a better CPU. You might even invest in a managed WordPress host that does some serious work caching all the things to make it faster.

Well HardyPress is really different. They host your WordPress site in a Docker container (think virtual machine) and you interact with it as you normally would. You create posts and pages and publish them. So far, so normal. The fun stuff starts to happen when you want to log out of WordPress and get on with other things. HardyPress then starts to crawl your site to work out all the posts and pages on your site and then it shuts down the Docker container.

Wait, I hear you splutter, where did my site go? If they shut down the machine that it’s hosted on, how in the name of Mullenweg are my users going to browse around it. Well, HardyPress crawled your site and created flat HTML / CSS / JS files and serves those up instead. So it’s really, really fast.

Instead of WordPress generating the page each time a user requests it, HardyPress simply serve up the flat HTML file. No PHP to run, no database calls and all that. It’s just fast.

I can, right now, hear your mind going, “This won’t work! What about forms and WooCommerce and all that server side stuff?” Well, you’d be right. This is not intended for you folk who are managing eCommerce shops or have crazy long forms (it does support Contact Form 7 though), it’s more for smaller sites that just want to impress Google with how lean and fast they are.

You get to hear Claudio explain how it’s all built, what’s going on in the background and why anyone would even want to use this. I have to say that I was sceptical at first, but that fact that HardyPress have realistic notions of who their clients are going to be restored my faith.

If you host sites and have never heard of this idea before, you should check it out. Golly, you should check it out even if you’re not going to use it, because it’s fun to hear about new WordPress stuff isn’t it?

I hope that you enjoy this episode and I’d love it if you shared it wherever there are buttons on the internet (which is everywhere)!