In this episode:
Discussion – Gutenberg, on / off or both? – [2:34]
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Interview – Lightening fast static WordPress hosting with Daniel Olson – [22:31]
Ending Fact – 8 out of 10 consumers will choose online shopping if free shipping is offered – [1:09:08]
I really like it when you talk to someone that has done a variety of things in the internet / WordPress space. Daniel Olson is a man that fits that description, as you’re about to find out! He’s got a whole heap of fin stuff going on which we talk about in depth, but the ‘long story short’ is that he’s an AWS (Amazon Web Services) expert.
If you did not know (cough, what!?!), AWS is the ridiculously large suite of tools that Amazon has built to make anything possible on the internet. I do mean anything!
Daniel leverages all that AWS goodness to build products that you might want to use for your WordPress business. For a start he has not one, but two hosting products that you might want to check out, Aminoto and Shifter. These are two completely different takes on hosting, but they both rely on AWS to do all-the-things in the background.
Aminoto is more of a ‘traditional’ host, in that you have a WordPress site up and running, but with the benefit of all the speed and scalability that using the AWS infrastructure can provide. You can use Amimoto to completely manage all the website, or if you’re a AWS expert, you can take control of the options in AWS to make it run in the way that you prefer. I love the fact that you can scale up and down and if you’re site is hit 40 bazillion times, AWS can deal with that for you. At WP Builds, we… erm… don’t have this problem!
The other option is Shifter, which takes a very different approach indeed. The Shifter way is to use AWS to provision a Docker instance. This Docker container can be turned on or off. What? Splutter! Turn the website off – why would you want to do that? You might want to do that because Shifter cleverly stores a ‘flattened’ copy of your website and stores it elsewhere. This flat HTML version of the site is super fast to load, because there is no database to query and no PHP to run. This has enormous speed benefits, but also some drawbacks, which Daniel deals with.
The main problem with the flattened HTML version that Shifter uses is that if there’s no PHP, you cannot submit forms and the like. Well, they’ve only gone and thought about that for you too!
WP Serverless Forms takes care of that little problem, and I love the fact that they’ve made this available to you on the WP.org repo, so that if you were inclined, you could use this flattened approach yourself!
Have a listen to the podcast and hear for yourself about the amazing stuff that Daniel and his team are doing with AWS.
As always, please feel free to share this episode throughout the known (and unknown) universe, and we always appreciate an iTunes review, which you can do via the iTunes button under the podcast player!
