A bunch of WordPress plugin owners are gonna delude themselves into thinking that running a hosting business is a good idea. It'll make sense right off the bat because they will be able to create meaningful MRR quickly off the back of their existing customers. But they won't be doing them any favors. I have a literal handful of devops engineers that would run circles around these devs and I still sleep like shit most nights. The security implications alone are absolutely horrifying. Most people in WP haven't even heard of an SRE, can't afford to hire one, and wouldn't be able to judge their talent even if the budget magically fell from the sky. We've taken customers from every single host on the planet and I can tell you that the number of hosts that I would trust with my kids lives, I can count them on like three fingers. These are companies purpose built to do the damn thing, with big teams and millions in payroll, tens or hundreds of millions in ARR and VC dollars injected. Tons of proper engineers. And I still throw up in my mouth a little bit every single day when we see what is happening to these shops. I'm all for a can-do attitude and a grinders mentality but JFC don't fuck around. If you're not deeply passionate about and/or psychotic-rage-monster-furious with this particular part of the arena, just pick an easier hill to die on. The only reason that it hasn't blown up already is because 95% of WordPress websites get lemonade stand levels of traffic. The servers are running smoothly because all that shit combined could run on a potato. It's gonna be all rainbows and bunny rabbits right up until the moment that Claude's sputtering prototype craters your customers literal livelihoods. You're not ready. Truth is: none of us are. Just find someone that will whitelabel their thing and partner with you on this horrifying shitshow while YOU focus on securing your codebase and operations. GLHF Cheers bye.

🫡 Making it so 😢

Black Friday is 28 days 8 hours and some minutes from now and if you run a WooCommerce shop that's going to do numbers, I've got a wager for you: Imagine... 1.) You give us a copy of your staging environment. 2.) We stand up a bespoke environment for you in our world. We're in 350+ datacenters currently so we have boxes where you need them. 3.) You tell us your peak checkout concurrency from last BFCM (or whenever the high water mark happened) 4.) I show you a completed load test with 3X that number of checkouts and zero errors. 5.) I present you with a number that is lower than what you paid last year AND I'll lock that monthly price for up to two years (practical restrictions apply of course) Now at this point one of three things happens: Door number one: We're happy, you're happy, and we make the money printer go brrrrr. Assuming we like you and you don't sell anything illegal where you sell it, this is what will happen. (Gray markets welcome) Option two is that it's not a great fit for either of us and we simply part as friends. You get a free load test and you learn a bunch of shit that most companies do wrong while charging you five grand for it. Door number three is: We fail the test and I lose the bet. In this diabolical branch of multiverse Small Devops Energy Patrick has to give $1000 to the charity of your choosing, and we have to continue to host your site in the upside down for free for the next six months. These things do cost thousands of dollars to do correctly so I'm only gonna do a handful of these for free. Next week we'll charge five grand and all bets are off. The only catch is that your Woo site must do at least $100K/month, ideally way more than that, and you have to be hosted with one of the Usual Suspects. If you're already on GP this isn't for you, you're already winning. If we only get a handful of takers, then it's first come first serve. If we get a lot of takers I'm gonna let my middle kid pick the winners based entirely upon whatever floats her boat, so if you sell squishies or over priced hoodies that are way too big or you're Salish Matter, hold on to your hats. GLHF and may the odds be ever in your favor.

We hit 37 checkouts per second on a big WooCommerce site yesterday and shit was humming along like nothing was happening. The last time we were is this range we were absolutely melting a 512 thread EPYC box. As my 12yo would say: "Girl, we are so goated"

Just saw the hype video for BlueChip from Anduril and I gotta say: I had no idea that someone who looks exactly like Palmer Lucky could get me so aroused. "It's time to bring Silicon back to the valley." Goddamnit they do comms so good.

He shot straight past "WordPress developer" and went directly to cyber expert.

Too soon, Matteo, too fucking soon! theatlantic.com/technology/2…

Feeling the full effects of the fall foliage, fart faces.

The vulnerabilities will continue until morale improves.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

October 21st The Great PHaPening Journal 9:00AM EST Update: It doesn't look like any of these "mitigations" that every hosting company on the face of the planet is rolling out are gonna do jack shit to stop this. It's an exploit within PHP itself, not some esoteric configuration mishap. Your order of operations should be: 1.) Be on Cloudflare behind their WAF (free tier gets the managed ruleset for free and there is nothing to configure but if you're on a paid tier make sure the managed ruleset is on and that you're not in Log Only mode) <--- comes straight from the CTO at Cloudflare 2.) Only accept connections from Cloudflare IPs 3.) If you can push to static and kill PHP do that 4.) If you are not on PHP 8.2 or later find a way to get there ASAP 5.) Run a manual backup now

This is fairly horrifying. Y'all have any idea how many millions of WordPress sites are still pre PHP8?

I've shown executive teams of series B companies enterprise use cases for their tools in our WooCommerce offering and they've stared at me like Luke Wilson and I just popped out of a time capsule next to a former Fuddruckers. "You mean... for WordPress? Is that even still a thing?!?" WP missing the moment is Shopify-years-old now, AI is just the next round.

"Having said that, when the founders decide to do this, you have just got to get with the program. It is not your company.” One of his best takes in the last six months.

In the age of AI absolutely everything is possible... except for sleeping well at night. For that you still need human beings who take responsibility for your shit and lose sleep on your behalf.

Liftoff 🚀 Unbelievably happy for you @ben_gabler !!! Can't wait to see you in Miami.

I clearly indicated that I wanted our spots to be flipped but the model can't help but make me a foot taller than @ben_gabler 😂

If you've ever wondered why your unlimited workers infinite scale horizontal managed WordPress thing never seems to actually work... it's because it's a literal cluster f@cK and it only "works" for sites that don't need it to work. AKA: It doesn't work.