375 – Insights from Marcel Bootsman on static site hosting with Kinsta

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 375, entitled insights from Marcel Bootsman on static site hosting with Kinsta. It was published on Thursday the 30th of May, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley and before we begin the chat with Marcel, a few bits of housekeeping.

The first thing to say is, thank you so much to anybody who attended the page builder summit last week. It was page builder summit version seven. It was very successful. Lots of engagement, lots of amazing talks. So from the bottom of my heart, sincere thanks to the speakers and the attendees, and also the sponsors. It really was a truly remarkable event. And I'm deeply grateful for anybody who in any way, shape or form was involved in that summit.

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Right, what have we got for you today? Well I'm chatting, as I said at the top of the show, with Marcel Bootsman from Kinsta. Now Kinsta recently did a big rebrand, but something else which may have escaped your attention is that they have also launched static WordPress site hosting.

So Marcel is here today to tell us all about that. What even is a static site? How does it work? What are the intricacies? What are the cost implications, the environmental implications, and so much more?

Turns out they have a really very, very generous free tier as well, where you can have many, many websites, completely hosted for free. So you might be interested in that.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy it..

I am joined on the podcast today by Marcel Bootsman. How are you doing?

[00:03:29] Marcel Bootsman: I'm doing fine. Nathan, how you

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: I can see Marcel on a screen in front of me. I know, dear listener, you can't see him, but he actually opened his mouth because I got his name right after only a few tries.

Yeah, I'm

[00:03:42] Marcel Bootsman: not gonna

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[00:03:43] Marcel Bootsman: we're not gonna say we practice

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, we're not gonna say, oh, we just did Nevermind. Marcel's joining me today. He's coming from Kinsta. Kinsta is, a company that I am sure that if you're in the WordPress space, you've heard of before, very, well known as a sort of managed, dedicated, if you like, WordPress hosts really drilling down on all the WordPress things.

But we're gonna talk today about some. not new, not really new anymore, but new to this podcast anyway, and possibly new to you. they've got a, static site hosting option, so we're gonna drill down into that. First of all, the, banal question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Marcel, would you just tell us about yourself, your journey with WordPress, including the, the 800 mile walk thing?

actually you don't have to mention that, but

[00:04:31] Marcel Bootsman: do you want to go

[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Tell us anything you like.

[00:04:36] Marcel Bootsman: it all started in, what was it, 2009? yes. And I'm, gonna do a summary on this. I'm not gonna do the full details. I started my own company, doing WordPress development, plugin development, theme development, maintenance, the whole thing. And after about eight, nine years, I was about ready with those challenges, started looking.

At other opportunities. And, somehow I got the thought of walking to Berlin from my hometown, which is near Rotterdam, and that was in 2019 for Word Camp Europe in Berlin. And, Kinsta was my main sponsor because I still had my own company then. So I needed to hire someone to well take care of my clients while I was walking.

And, Kinsta was my main sponsor because I already had some websites with them. And during my walk, I had a lot of time to think about, okay, what's my future? What do I wanna do? Do I wanna start something new? Do I wanna hire people or maybe work for a company? And Kinsta was on my list and it was actually on spot number one to contact them and see if they would have, a, place for me to work.

And so I basically sent their CEO Mark gda. I sent him a Twitter dm, saying, Hey Mark, thanks for sponsoring me for my walk to Berlin. I kind of wanna work with you. What's your thought? And after that, within I believe two weeks, I had a lot of conversations going with some people at Kinsa, and I was hired and started in on April 1st, 2020.

And that's four years ago, a little bit more over four years ago. And I've done marketing for the Dutch market and right now I'm doing business development for the Dutch market and the German speaking market, which is Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, nice. Kinsta is a, like I said, a very, well known company. I, don't know if the, growth is still as exponential as it felt like it was several years ago, almost everybody listening to this podcast will have heard of what you do. you can go to Kinsta. Com. So that's with A-K-K-I-N-S-T a.com.

You can go and check out the normal, bits and pieces that they offer, but maybe do this instead. Go to Google and Google Kinsta static site hosting. Try that. And probably the first page that you're gonna get to is there static site hosting for free. It says on the page here, So this is something that we are not really familiar with, I don't think, with hosting companies offering static site hosting.

Certainly when you came out with this a few months ago, I read the email. I was like, whoa, that's interesting. don't normally see that. Normally it's about, the hardware and the CPUs and the one click install and all that kind of stuff. But this is something a little bit different.

There's gonna be a proportion of people who don't know what static site hosting is, so let's tackle that technical piece first. What is STA Static site hosting, and why would you ever want to do that?

[00:07:58] Marcel Bootsman: there are multiple reasons why you wanna do that, but before we dive into that, I would like to explain a little bit what, what a static site. Basically is, and we are, I believe the majority of the audience is very familiar with WordPress. And WordPress out of the box does not. I. Produce a static website.

it runs on a database, it runs with PHP. Of course there's some JavaScript involved and C-S-S-H-T-M-L, of course. but mostly, and if you don't consider caching, every request to a WordPress website requires the server to do something. get your content from the database, produce A-H-T-M-L page and push that to your browser.

So looking at a static website, that's basically back to. What is it? Nineties something last century days, and. People created a website locally, maybe with front page or any other old, what is it, Dreamweaver or whatever, those times, you would, build a website locally, that would export as an HTML based website and you could just upload those files to any kind of server around there.

And that would be your website. So it would basically consist of static files, Which do not, do anything on the server. the server just sends the files to the browser and that's it. And it's basically, consists of HTML, some CSS, JavaScript, all static files. And of course we have other things like images and maybe movies or videos.

but that is basically it. And the server doesn't have to do anything else than send those files over.

[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. So the, an analogy, okay. No, actually, I want to just take that back a little bit further because I, know that the, audience for this podcast is fairly broad and everything that you just said made perfect sense to me, but it, I'm just gonna reprise that a little bit. So every time you visit a WordPress, a, regular WordPress webpage, there's a whole.

Ton of things going on in the background. Little conversations that are happening saying, how do I actually make this page? Which bits need to be deployed to that page? What? What's go, what's gonna go in the header now? What's gonna go in the content? Is there anything to go in the footer? Is there a loop going on somewhere where we're gonna cycle through the post?

And all of this happens in a heartbeat, but nevertheless, it's happening and it's consuming resources. It's using op power and it's slowing things down a little bit now. whether or not you believe WordPress out of the box is, slow, is up to you. typically it's fairly fast.

But the minute you start piling on plugins and things do start to slow down. So there's this whole big conversation happening every time you request a page. Whereas what you are saying is, with a static site, all you say is, give me the finished page. And you give the finish page, all of the construction work, the conversations that had to happen in code to make that page, they've already happened and been stored somewhere.

And you just say, gimme the finish thing. And because it's the finished thing, you just go, yeah, there it is. Like just one thing right there, and it's much, much quicker. So speed is a thing.

[00:11:20] Marcel Bootsman: Yes.

[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Is there anything else that's a thing apart from just speed?

[00:11:25] Marcel Bootsman: Speed is a thing. It's also cost. if you have a website that requires processing, whether it's a small WordPress site or a, large e-commerce website, or even a forum or something like that, you need to have processing done on the server and processing costs money, Some hosters, they, provide data on their website. if you want package a, you get one CPU, you get this amount of ram, you get this amount of storage. And of course storage is something that's also, necessary for static file hosting, storage, static site hosting, but you don't need any processing.

The only thing that needs to be done, sure there is a little bit of processing done because a file needs to be retrieved from the, hard disk and needs to be sent. But that's the only processing that takes place. So if you wanna do static site hosting and if you wanna build a static site, you could dramatically reduce cost of hosting your website.

[00:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: I guess

[00:12:26] Marcel Bootsman: depending on what kind of site it is.

[00:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I guess an another cost. Which not a monetary cost is the environmental impact.

[00:12:35] Marcel Bootsman: Definitely.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: area which is increasingly getting attention, that I'm seeing more and more things popping up about, sustainability is basically the, best word to use, about the sustainability.

And obviously if you are consuming CPU cycles and hundreds of things are happening to create a page that's going to. Go through, jewels of energy. That's got to be, in many cases that'll be burning, carbon or something like that, whereas in this thing, only one thing is happening.

So there is also that environmental impact as well. So Google will love it because it's fast. The environment will like it more because it's less polluting. This is

[00:13:17] Marcel Bootsman: it takes way less energy, and, that's basically it for every request to a WordPress website. leaving cash out of the picture here. Needs energy, needs more energy than just sending a file over. And if you have a website that basically is a static website for the user, if you have a, if you have a blog, if you have a small company website with just some pages telling the visitors what your company is, who is working for it, it, it basically can be transformed into a static website because nothing really happens.

on the website for a visitor, there's no active things happening there. There's no cart, there's no, processing needed on the backend. And if you have a site like that, it might be a real good candidate to see, okay, what happens if we make this a static website? And that could dramatically decrease the power usage.

[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: So there are, by the sounds of it, there are some scenarios where static websites are definitely, this is worth considering, but there may well be other. Areas where you really do need that server to be part of the equation. Because I think you mentioned e-commerce, so let's imagine like a WooCommerce store or something like that, that you need all of that, right?

Because you need to have the, cart being updated. You need to be able to, I don't know, there needs to be form fields in there so that you can pay for things and what have you. So the best fit. Is a website, which doesn't really change all that much. You might describe it as a brochure website. So I just said that.

I'm not saying you said that, but is that broadly right?

[00:14:51] Marcel Bootsman: yeah, you can say that. And if you have a website where you don't need people to log in, that's, a thing because logging in, that requires some checking on the backend. It, requires a database with the username and password. and anything else, might be eligible to turn into a static website.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. funnily enough, I'm just imagining myself browsing around the internet looking at like local companies where I live, like the plumber and the lawyer and what have you. I. They're not, really logging people in. They're not really having dynamic things on there. maybe the most dynamic thing would just be a form, like a contact us form.

But aside from that, it's basically static and it, that seems to be the majority. okay. So there's a real business case. If you are a website builder, there's a real legitimate reason for doing this. Just on that point, how do we handle things like forms? Are there any. Possible ways of handling forms within our WordPress website.

Can you bind a form to the static site, or do you have to use like a third party

[00:15:57] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, there, both options are true. You can, if we go into the last option, which is using a third party, you can include some JavaScript on your static website, which actually loads the contact form functionality in the browser instead of loading it on the server and all. checking is being done in the browser and data is being sent to that third party.

So that would require some processing, but not on your site because it's offloaded to that, third party. the other thing that can happen that if you have a WordPress website, and you use Gravity Forms for instance, or contact force form seven for your, for your forms, you could actually still have that.

WordPress website being available on the internet, but not bound to a public domain or something, and generate a static website that generates that forms for you. And at the moment you press the submit button, it will contact your WordPress site, which is somewhere and, then basically performs all the checking and the storage of the data in that form.

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. we can explore that in greater depth, but I, don't think that's probably the, what we need to do. But the idea is you can use third parties and there are certain ways that you could integrate something like, and you mentioned a couple there. I'm imagining there the. Maybe that's the architecture that you've got.

Gravity forms and contact form seven are options that you can use with your platform. Okay, that's interesting. They're two very big hitters in the,

[00:17:25] Marcel Bootsman: exactly.

[00:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: space. Okay. So how the heck does the actual static site get built? 'cause obviously it has to be prebuilt so that when the page is requested, that page already.

Is somewhere, what's going on? Is it like some sort of Google spidery thing where you, bring your WordPress website to life for a period of time? It spiders all of the different pages, following all the links like the Google bot would do. And then what do you do? Do you just shot the WordPress website down, like so it doesn't even exist.

So I'm putting a, I'm putting a lot of ideas out there. I dunno if any of them are true. tell me what's going on.

[00:18:06] Marcel Bootsman: I'll tell you what's going on. There are, it depends, which is mostly a correct answer doing it stuff, doing a WordPress, if you start off with a WordPress website and you decide, okay, I want to have this website transformed into a static website, you could use some of the plugins that are out there.

There are plugins out there that you can install on your WordPress site, and you basically just press a button, and that will generate, a zip file for you or will contact a Git repository where your static files will be stored. And, there are also other CMSs out there that. Basically generate a website for you.

You mostly use that on a local computer. You build the website there either by yourself or with a team. you export that or you commit that to a repository, a Git repository, and you connect that to your hosting, platform. So those are basically the, big, the, two options that you have there.

And as soon as you put your static website in a repository. it's very easy to connect that with Kinsta Static site hosting. You just point, your hosting account to your Git repository and every time you have a new commit, basically a new version of your static website, Kinsta, gets a ping and deploys your repository to Kinsa static site hosting.

[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I think one of the bits that I definitely missed there was the. You are not hosting the WordPress website, so it's not like you've got a, a WordPress website which comes to life. You interact with it, you shut it down again in the scenario you've just said. And, I can see, Marcello is shaking his head at me, so there's more to this, but I'll just finish this little bit.

Okay. There's one way you can do it. You can, have it local, you could have it somewhere else on the internet, and then you could connect it to, let's say, a Git repository and, me, Kinsta will then be, you'll set it up in such a way that if anything changes on the Git repository, the Kinsta static site generator will go, Ooh, give me that.

And, it grabs it. Okay. But maybe there is an option to have the website on Kinsta as well.

[00:20:28] Marcel Bootsman: Oh, definitely. Yeah, you can. You can, host your website, your WordPress website with our hosting. you can add a domain name to that, but you also get like a temporary domain name like, my website dot Kinsta cloud. And that domain name is already accessible through the internet. So if you want to have form integrations or other integrations that a, static site, interacts with your WordPress site, that's already possible.

So you can host it at Kinsta and you can also. Build it on a local computer with a local team or by yourself.

[00:21:04] Nathan Wrigley: If you, host it with Kinsta, does that website stay alive the whole time or can you put it to sleep, if Because obviously if the purpose of that is to, interact with it whilst you need it, and then for the period of time where you are not interacting with you, you really don't need it.

So is it possible to make it dormant or anything like that?

[00:21:27] Marcel Bootsman: really, making it dormant as in not accessible. that's not really an option we have on the platform except for removing the website, but that would not be very smart to do. I think, if you have a WordPress website that is. low traffic, and connected to that static website.

You could just basically start off with a, very basic plan and have that website up and running, and connect it to a static site.

[00:21:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright, thank you. where, what's the, kind of ideal from your perspective, where seems to be the, kind of ideal target audience for this? Maybe that question doesn't have an answer and there isn't a perfect target audience, but have you discovered that it is mom and pop stores, it's the smaller brochure websites, or can it go medium size or even enterprise?

Where are you pitching this?

[00:22:24] Marcel Bootsman: It, depends. Again, there we are. it really depends. I, gave a talk in, on Word Camp Vienna a few weeks ago, and also about, word pressing combination with static website hosting. And what is that there are plenty of opportunities for a certain kind of websites to be. Like transformed into a static website.

And those are basically the websites that require a little to no interaction with the user. they have no personalization, so you don't need to log in and you don't have any processing needed in the backend as in checking inventory or updating inventory in a web shop or those kind of things. So if you have a small company website from the local bakery where you just say, okay, we have these kinds of breads that we sell, a story about the company that is, a, perfect candidate to consider making that a static website because you need to generate it once and every user gets the same website. You don't need any tailored options there.

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I, get it. I'm guessing also, there, there's an interesting. juxtaposition here. If you're an agency owner and a proportion of your clients fit that sweet spot, and they're really not interested in the conversation of, okay, where am I going to host it? They just wanna know.

That it's alive and active and it's go, it's, quick. So Google likes my site. It's an interesting idea to, as an agency, think, okay, this subset of our websites could be turned static. Let's just make 'em static. You, as an agency owner are gonna make savings. We'll get onto the pricing in a minute.

There was the word free on the page there. you'll make savings. Your client will still be. Happy, because they've got a fast website. So it's an interesting economic argument stacking up here. okay. What's this free business all about then? How is it that something like this can be free?

[00:24:27] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, it's free because, we like to contribute to our, clients, and why it's free. I, can tell a little bit about what actually that free means. you can, host like 100 static sites. your account. So if you have a lot of clients that fit, fit like the local bakery website, you could really consider, okay, I pay an X amount of money right now for WordPress hosting.

You might have had, sorry, you might have a big plan to host all those websites, those word WordPress websites. you could maybe pull a few to static site hosting and you could reduce your cost that you pay for your WordPress plan. You can have, 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.

So that's really a lot of data that's going to be transferred. And the free thing, it comes because it actually doesn't cost us any money to host it.

[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:25:33] Marcel Bootsman: And it's the secret of the trade. We cannot tell exactly what's happening there, If we don't have to pay anything to make our clients, or to have our clients host a static website, why would we charge money for that?

looking at it commercially, of course, there is, there should be a business model behind something that is free. there's a lot of free services on the internet and with a lot of these services you pay with your data. in this case you do not pay with your data. we just see there's an opportunity for us there that if you are considering static websites, you might also do something with WordPress or you might also do something with other applications, maybe a JavaScript framework to build your websites or Laravel app.

And those are applications we can also host, but that's maybe subject matter for a different talk. But, there, there is a business model behind it and. Yeah, it doesn't cost us any money, so why would we ask money for it?

[00:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in common parlance, you might term that like it's a loss leader. You're, you, there's, you put out this nice offer. and the hope is that a proportion of the people, if you discover new clients, that maybe they'll, get into WooCommerce and start to use the, the other bits and pieces that Kinsta offer.

[00:26:50] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, definitely. We, already see that, we also see that clients that have WordPress websites, they move, a certain amount of WordPress websites, to aesthetic site hosting solution, and. That's perfectly fine. Yeah. It costs us money because, we earn less from customers using a free service than using our paid WordPress service.

on the other hand, new customers come in and see our other offerings and yeah, that basically, pays the bills.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: One of the, one of the things about going with a bigger hosting company, which you know, you are, is the idea of a CDN. the, load gets spread around, the resources, the assets, whatever it may be, get, get spread around the internet so that somebody in Australia. Doesn't have to go that far in order to retrieve that image.

Everything's quicker, everything's speedier. Do these static sites receive that same treatment? So if I built a static site, would it get spread over your global network of servers in the same way?

Oh,

[00:27:48] Marcel Bootsman: You, you've done your research well, Nathan. Very good.

[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: Woo.

[00:27:53] Marcel Bootsman: what we do for static with site hosting is also since we also have our WordPress, plans integrated with CloudFlare. and with all their services, our static site hosting uses CloudFlare Edge Network and that basically pushes your website to, what is it, 260 plus locations around the world.

So if you have a static website that needs to be fast, there's a big chance that people are going to access your website, are going to use a local, or a very close by server park that hosts your website.

[00:28:27] Nathan Wrigley: So it's, a, nice CDN network, which is fast. Statics files themselves are fast. It's almost like you're going back in time. You're, serving up the site before somebody's even decided to hit the button. But honestly, I, know I'm, Joking about that. How, okay, there's no metric that you can put on this probab probably, but how quick do these things actually feel, if you had a brochure site for the plumber down the road for me, is it that beautiful experience where you click a button and it's boom, you, hit the button to get to the next page and it's just there.

[00:29:04] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, I'm nodding my head here, but people can't see that. But yes, that's, what it is. Because the only thing that needs to be done is a file needs to be retrieved and needs to be sent to your browser, and your browser needs to, interpret that. And that happens. with a lot of us using state-of-the-art laptops or desktop computers, or even phones, they, those are fast enough to build A-H-T-M-L site in, milliseconds.

And, when you click a link on a static site, and that goes to the same site, not to another site, it's like the instant, experience. You click a link and as soon as you. Let go of your mouse button or stop tapping your screen on your mobile. The new site or the new page is there. And that's, basically what it is.

And I wanted to actually compare it to like the old days. but the, in the old days we had slower computers, so it wasn't that, that instantly, except when going really back when we only had text in our browser and no other stuff. but that's well way back.

[00:30:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember it though.

[00:30:10] Marcel Bootsman: Me too.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: but it is honestly, from an end user perspective, there is something I may be being terribly nerdy here. You know that moment though, where you get that, you go to a site and it is literally instant. It is, it's quite jarring because a lot of the internet is not that, and, we've got to the point where two seconds, I'll go off and read the newspaper or something.

And when you see that and you get that moment where you click the, button and the page is there, it's almost unbelievable. You your hand is still in the way of the phone by the time you've pulled the finger away and you're not sure. Did that do anything? Or is I'm still on the same page.

So that's beautiful. Your end users, the people that are surfing your website will love that. But also Google is gonna love that. you go onto the core web vitals, test suites, and I'm imagining that the results are generally green.

[00:31:14] Marcel Bootsman: they should be definitely green. there, there are always, websites that manage to not get to

[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, bless. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:24] Marcel Bootsman: they would need to, consult with someone that knows how things work, or

[00:31:29] Nathan Wrigley: seven megabyte image, which ends up as a thumbnail or something like

[00:31:33] Marcel Bootsman: if, you put a seven megabyte image on a static website, sure it will load slower than if you use an optimized version of that image.

That would probably be just 100 kilobytes. You know that. Sure. That happens

[00:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: But it is.

Sorry, I was just, I didn't mean to interrupt.

[00:31:49] Marcel Bootsman: okay,

[00:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: let's, let's just go into the, I'm, gonna call it hybrid and this is totally new to me, right? So if, any of this I get really, wrong, do forgive me. Just school me on this. At the bottom of your, page here, you actually talk about the fact that you could have this like hybrid model almost, where you've got a static site.

But possibly with dynamic parts. This is something I, don't know anything about, so you're gonna have to explain that. How does, how is it possible to have a static site into which dynamic content can be inserted? And we're on audio. I guess we gotta keep it on a certain understandable level, but you go a bit nerdy if you like.

[00:32:32] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, I can, get a bit nerdy and when I was in my agency time, which is about five years ago now, I. I liked all the techniques that happened around WordPress. if there's a, if there's a client asking for a solution, I was already thinking, okay, how can I build this? And then you build it with PHP, with your WordPress database and those kind of things.

If you start off with a static website and you want to have some kind of interaction, whatever it is. and you need to interact with a database or with another application. A JavaScript is really the tool that can help you do that. JavaScript runs completely in your browser, and if you have the right things set up, you can basically have it retrieve data from a database somewhere.

You can have it pushed data to a database if you want to. So there's actually a lot of things. Possible with a static website. it doesn't have to be that static at all. And now it might even be more complicated when I say that because a static, website can be static, but it can also be like dynamic.

Can I say that?

[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so there are static parts of it if you like. the bits that can be static And the bits that you do need to be, dynamic. I'm just thinking, I'm trying to think, imagine a situation, like a shopping experience or something like that. You might be able to build something on top of that.

anyway, sorry I interrupted you. Carry on.

[00:33:59] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, it's always the question if you. If you really need to do like a shopping experience on a static website, if things are technically possible, it doesn't mean you should use it. it, really, depends on, the use case. And it really depends on, on, on performance of the website and, of the complexity of a solution.

sorry, you can make any, you can, you can build anything, but it should be feasible, it should be manageable, those kind of things. People should be able to work with it and. I, can, think of a solution that might be handy for a static website. Let's, say you want to import the latest, blog

[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:34:40] Marcel Bootsman: of another website or even of your own content on another WordPress website.

You could build something in JavaScript that, that pulls the, well, the last five posts of your website and uses that. the, disadvantage of that is that when you load the website, you might get like these content shifts that Google doesn't like. So you have this page, this, I'm pointing out here, but it doesn't matter.

We're on audio only. but you have this page, and let's say in the footer you want to have the last five blogs. you can also do that on a real static way. if those blogs don't change like every hour. you could do that on a static site and just put those blog posts in a static file and put them there.

But, that's what I said. technical, technically everything is possible, but you should ask yourself, is that the right thing to do? And do the users really benefit from that?

[00:35:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting that on your sales page, which I will link to in the show notes, that this kind of hybrid thing that you talk about, where you talk about, combining dynamic content that's very much at the bottom of that page. And so I'm, guessing that it's okay, yeah, you can do this.

It's probably not for everybody. Certainly. I would imagine you need to be wearing a developer hat,

[00:35:54] Marcel Bootsman: definitely.

[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, maybe for the, typical brochure website, this is not something you need to worry about anyway. It's there, it's on that page. You mentioned earlier a few of the, limitations, not limitations, a few of the constraints that you've got around this model.

So it's a hundred sites per account, which is really a lot. when you think about it, a hundred just. Just picture that for a minute. A hundred sites, that's a lot. One gigabyte size limit per site, so you need to be able to get that site down to. A gigabyte. So you know, if it was a, gigabyte, again, a gigabyte with optimized images and what have you represents a

[00:36:33] Marcel Bootsman: a lot.

[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: then you've got a hundred gigabytes of bandwidth.

Again, obviously if you've got, if you're running the bbc.co.uk, don't bother. But if it's a brochure website, you'd probably be lucky to get through two or three of those in a week if it's local. But here's the interesting one, which I don't fully understand. 600 build minutes. Now, what does that mean?

[00:36:58] Marcel Bootsman: Yes, I can tell you something about that. When you're building a static website, there's a ton of options you can choose from. you can use a static site generator and generate your static website locally. you can run WordPress locally and generate it locally as a static site, but there's also systems that like run.

From a GI repository, and at the moment you push something to that repository, you can tell kinesthetic site hosting. Okay, here's my repository. This contains like all the. Files that are needed because it's all, it's file based. Most of those JavaScript, frameworks, here are all the files, now build my website.

So basically then you say, okay, I'm not gonna build it locally, or I'm gonna build it somewhere on a server, but I'm gonna say to Kinsta, okay, here is my repository. This contains the new version. Now build my website. building a website, costs processing time, and we limited that to 600 build minutes, per month.

To compare, if you have a simple website with 100 blog posts, and a few pages that would take around one or two minutes to build

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:38:11] Marcel Bootsman: So you have plenty of time to, to update your website. If you forget something, you can do a new commit and you can have it built again without extending that, 600 built

minutes

[00:38:23] Nathan Wrigley: but you could, roll your own, you could, wrap it up with some plugin that will, do all of this for you. And you are in effect, you are building the, you're using your own build minutes. But if you wanna over to Kinsta and use their. infrastructure, that's obviously something which actually costs you money and, you can't just keep hemorrhaging money on all of these free static websites.

So there's a, barrier on that of 600 build minutes, but it sounds to me, that's what's spread over the month. So you've got those per month and it'll refresh on the next month kind of thing.

[00:38:57] Marcel Bootsman: It will refresh. Yeah, you cannot save it up. if you have only used one build minute in month, January, you do not get 600 plus 599. it's just 600 per month and that's it. And if you don't use it, No worries.

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but I guess that workload for a typical agency, that would get spread out, wouldn't it? you're not doing all the work on January the first. a little bit here, a little bit there. Update that website, see where the build minutes go. Is there any option to, acquire more build minutes?

Let's say that I get to 599 and I've suddenly got this, oh, I need to push this thing. can you do that? Or is do, how does that work? Is that even

[00:39:36] Marcel Bootsman: We like, to be very flexible, Nathan.

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay.

[00:39:39] Marcel Bootsman: if, that, if that is the case, we can look into that and, we can definitely find a solution for that. I, cannot say here. Okay. If you need more, we, can give it to you. It depends on a, per case,

[00:39:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Don't, come to Marcel with I need 8,000 more minutes,

[00:39:57] Marcel Bootsman: yeah. let's talk to

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, 604 maybe. That's, maybe that's more of a conversation we can have. the really, fascinating, I, honestly think this is gonna be such an interesting thing. It sounds like you've had a little bit of a, an uptake of it.

How, has the platform been been, used, have people been coming to it and making use of it?

[00:40:21] Marcel Bootsman: Yeah, we've, we are seeing, good growth. I'm not gonna share any numbers here, because I also don't have those numbers in my head right now, but. we've, we are seeing a lot of clients, testing it out. we've seen a lot of people, publishing sites on the static site hosting platform, and it's really fun to see what kind of sites, are being launched.

it's basically, it's the small websites, but all also these small websites. they deserve a good place to be hosted. And, yeah, we offer this platform. And if you look at agencies, you already said it a few minutes back, that if you have a lot of WordPress sites that. Conform to the small website or small static website, idea, those are real good candidates to just think about, okay, what can we do and can we still, can we maybe make our clients more happy with a static website instead of a WordPress website that already performs pretty well, on our platform, but might even perform better if you, transform it into a static website?

[00:41:21] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to, I'm gonna assume that on the website, although I haven't looked for it, that there will be significant amounts of documentation to help you get through all of the bits and p, the hoops that you'd need to jump through in order to get this set up. But also, another question. So you said yes to that.

There's documentation to, to help you through all the bits and pieces. Thank you. And Marcel's nodding, but also, How do you deal with support? Obviously this is a free thing if we start to consume your support hours, that's suddenly starts to get very expensive. But are we entitled to, to support for any of

[00:41:56] Marcel Bootsman: yes, you are definitely entitled to support. Once you want to go ahead with static site hosting at kinsa, you get a Mike Ssta account and whenever you are in the Mike Kinsta environment, you have access to 24 7 support, through chat and whatever our Kinsta docs cannot tell you. Our support agents will definitely help you with that because we have an extended.

how do you say the documentation website about, everything we host and also static site hosting is a part of that. And you could basically find anything, that we have experience with our clients. We put that in the docs section for others to find, to also offload the depend number of people that need to contact support.

And, there's a lot in there, just how, to start. There are like quick start, articles. In the static site hosting docu documentation, which basically tell you, okay, how do I deploy a website using Gatsby or Astro or View Press or whatever. there's a Git repository linked there and you can check out that GI repository.

And how does it work with Kins, the static site hosting, and you can just start with that.

[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's great to know. Thank you. as I said before, Kinsta, K-I-N-S-T-A. Dot com. but go to static site hosting if you wanna discover the page that I've been looking at today with Marcel. Is there anything we missed? I'm, I was gonna wrap it up there, but curious to know if there's anything you wanted to say that you didn't get a chance to.

[00:43:27] Marcel Bootsman: No, I didn't. I didn't think, if we were talking about WordPress plans, I would be talking about all kinds of different plans we have and what the cost is. But with static website hosting, it's very easy. It's free.

[00:43:38] Nathan Wrigley: The pricing is a big round number. Literally it's a zero. yeah, it's perfect. I love that. A round number. It's zero. okay. Perfect. Thank you Marcel, for chatting to me today about that. Really appreciate it. So as I said, one more time, Google Kinsta and static site hosting, or just go to the URL I just mentioned.

They'll all be in the show notes. Okay. Thank you, Marcel. Take care. We'll speak to you soon.

[00:44:02] Marcel Bootsman: Thanks for being on the show, Nathan. Bye-Bye.

[00:44:04] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting with Marcel from Kinsta all about static site hosting on their platform. If you've got any comments about that, if you've got any thoughts, go to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 375, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate that.

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Okay. That's all I've got for you this week. Other than to say, please join us at the, this week in WordPress show, we do that every Monday, 2:00 PM UK time. We'll be doing that live over at wpbuilds.com/live. Give us your comments, we'd love that. We'll put that out as a podcast episode, just like this episode. If you want to subscribe to it, head to wpbuilds.com/subscribe and follow some of the bits and pieces that we've got for you over there.

Okay, I'm going to fade in some really dreadful, cheesy music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.