Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator

Show HN: HardyPress – Use WordPress as a static site generator
hardypress.com

One of my scariest memories of getting hacked (back when I was a total greenhorn and cloud computing was rare) was hosting Wordpress blog on the same server as our main site. It got hacked bad. We had viagra links in all our files and it was a total nightmare to cleanup. Upon research I found out that there is an entire market of people trying to find WP hacks and sell it online. God knows how big it must be now.

Anyway, thankfully now you can just host your WP blog on an EC2/DO instance and eliminate all risks. But always keep your WP database and instance separate is what I learned from that.

You become my new hosting company and that worries me. But more importantly, these 3 selling points "Support for Contact Forms 7", "Instant search out of the box", "Keep using plugins". I now have to vet plugins myself and guess if they are going to break in your system. It also makes me think about what I can or can't do when building themes myself which I usually don't have to do. The part about you injecting code into the site to add your own instant search is also worrying.

My main takeaway would be that your service is appropriate for novice users and maybe I'm not the target audience. But novice users might not know what static websites are or the differences between them and non-static sites and so I would market the service differently. Instead of focusing on technical features I would just sell it as a hosted Wordpress service with extra bells and whistles that make your sites faster than a normal host. The focus being fast, secure, ease of use, low maintenance etc and renegating the technical aspects about it being headless, generating static pages, WP running on a separate domain and so on to just a technical explanation page for users that are interested.

I hope I haven't dissuaded you, Good luck!

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This is after two first minutes, so I guess there are still things to work on. In any case, for more advanced users your product is a great no-no, since the main advantage of WP is that it's FOSS - who would want to become your hostage? I see a lot of potential for an open source solution, the idea is really good.

Maybe, maybe not anymore. Now the main advantage of WP is that it's ubiquitous/low barrier to entry and has (too) many plugins/themes/etc available.

Incidentally, that's also WP's main disadvantage because those things greatly increase it's attach surface.