Based on Cloudflare R2 S3 object storage costs for 33GB of WordPress plugins, for a private WordPress plugin mirror would cost less than US$0.35/month though will rise as new plugin versions get downloaded and stored and if under generous R2 Class A/B write and read operation free monthly quota, the R2 operation costs would be free. The Cloudflare Worker costs based on past 24hrs metrics was 765K Worker requests at median of 2.1ms CPU time. So with 100K Worker requests/day free, cost would essentially be the $5/month Cloudflare Worker subscription fee as overages won't apply under their generous paid US$5/month subscription plan includes up to 10 million requests per month at average 10ms average CPU time. All up, it would be US$5.35/month starting costs which will rise as number of WordPress plugins and Worker usage increases as outlined here. Cloudflare CDN bandwidth is free of charge, so no need to worry about egress bandwidth fees.
If you keep scrolling down, the projected costs for operating this thing are estimated between $40 - $7000USD per month.
What if I instead buy a cheap 10TB hard drive and crawl at a more relaxed rate on a commodity PC at home? The cost goes way, way down after the initial investment, to near zero.. after one year the amortized H/W costs would be around $30 per month.
Additionally, 1 gigabit+ FTTH unmetered symmetric fiber Internet lines are ever more available at a competitive price.
If you're going at it this way then it's easy to male it worth it
8 gigabit unmetered symmetric fiber for 50e a month
500e initial one time purchase for a ryzen 6800u in mini desktop factor form with 32 gb of memory and 512 nvme gb drive.
Proxmox installation.
Electricity at 0,017 kwh with a 15w cpu.
You can now hosts dozens of such projects. Upgrades for later include : an UPS for eventual power cut or surge, a small NAS for mass storage, a second mini desktop for Proxmox redondancy and replication.
Since fiber lines have becomes the norm self hosting stuff at home has been a breeze and a joy for small projects.
Extra bonus : jellyfin, pihole, home assistant, and all sort of other goodies can easily get a spot on that proxmox.
Also, unless something's changed, the free tier only technically covers "web content". Going outside HTML and related material directly supporting the display of ordinary web pages (javascript referenced by your HTML, some light image serving, CSS) puts you outside what's covered by the TOS. You can't count on it for that at all.
IIRC that also goes for the other "self serve" plans, so includes paid plans. You need an enterprise plan (probably $5k+/m) to distribute non-Web-page-related files without violating the TOS. People often get away with it as long as they don't go too wild, but you're in even riskier territory than one already is using non-enterprise Cloudflare.
Cloudflare does allow R2 (& some other "Developer Platform" services) for non-HTML content. They made some TOS changes in the past to be more explicit about it.
You can use R2 for multiple scenarios, including but not limited to:
Storage for cloud-native applications
Cloud storage for web content
Storage for podcast episodes
Data lakes (analytics and big data)
Cloud storage output for large batch processes, such as machine learning model artifacts or data sets
It's not "until sales shows up", it's until regulators start causing problems for Cloudflare because you are using Cloudflare infra to host a grey market online gambling website.
We have also published our tool to mirror the WordPress repository. We took a different approach. Our tool, Morpheus, mirrors the exact WordPress API. It fetches and maintains only the latest versions of plugins, themes, and the WordPress core. This limits disk space considerably.
There’s also a plugin that connects to WordPress.org by default but falls back to Morpheus if needed.
We’re still working on improvements. Right now, we only support English-language updates, but we’re adding more languages and features. Our goal is to support the entire API.
Maybe they could just host the newsletter and contact form plugins to cover 97% of WordPress sites and email other plugin updates to the remaining 3% on a weekly basis?
I feel like the solution to wordpress-the-org being mismanaged is not to build better replacement infra around wordpress, but to build better publishing tools that don’t burn a mysql connection and require php get executed on every pageview.
WordPress has literally millions of Web sites in production, tons of add-on software, and an ecosystem of companies and people providing solutions for it. Suggesting that the solution is "well, just start from scratch with something else" is unlikely to get you very far.
It is far easier and more likely that the community around WordPress would rally around replacing WP.org than starting over from scratch with a new toolkit. Some people might flee WP altogether, but the majority of people and companies just want to get things done - not seeing them having a lot of tolerance for or interest in having to start again from square one.
Bad software gets popularised all the time, there is nothing wrong with having alternatives and having more choices. I strongly think we need some good alternatives to Wordpress, as someone who has been in the publishing industry in the last decade.
Also, Wordpress doesn't scale well (without getting expensive), the code is bad, it is poorly managed, security issues are all over the place. It's about time we got some alternatives.
>Suggesting that the solution is "well, just start from scratch with something else" is unlikely to get you very far.
To be fair, the first and best solution most people in these parts have is "Fork it, I'm going to make my own Linux distro." or something along those lines.
No, they don't get very far but I will credit their consistency.
Amazingly stupid take. Sorry to be blunt but I'm so tired of seeing these. Every thread about WordPress on Hacker News devolves into someone who obviously doesn't work extensively with WordPress, ranting about how bad the code of WordPress is.
So this is the year 2024, and something amazing called a CDN has been invented. PHP does not get executed on every pageview, nor does a Mariadb connection get burned. If you are building a website or web application at scale with any framework or platform, a big part of your job is to architect it such that everything which can be cached, is. You may also employ tools like Varnish or transients. The underlying design principles are universal and whether you're building on top of WordPress or something else doesn't matter that much - in fact many experienced WordPress developers are accustomed to serving multiple millions or tens of millions of users per month, so the ways for making this work are pretty mature.
I guess you MVP would be something that could do simple brochure websites and be easy to extend. Design it so it is easy to install for individuals or web hosting companies. Maybe plan ahead for things like multi-site, blogging, eCommerce. etc
With all the competition and even the MVP is going to be a lot of work, especially since the average user won't be very technical.
> publishing tools that don't burn a mysql connection and require php get executed on every pageview.
Has anyone tried to use Wordpress as a static site generator, with a few
dynamic-content functions moved to Javascript against an API for alternative open-source server (or even another Wordpress instance)?
What's wrong with opening a MySQL connection on every page view?
Unlike PostgreSQL, MySQL was specifically designed to handle a very large number of short-lived connections. A properly configured MySQL daemon can handle tens of thousands of connections per second. If you're still opening and closing too many connections for that, MySQL supports using Unix domain sockets instead of TCP, and PHP supports persistent connections -- a sort of ad hoc connection pooling system.
There are many issues with WordPress and its ecosystem, for sure, but database connection handling isn't one.
I think it’s forking Wordpress to get rid of the madman who is bdfl while not being actually being benevolent. Who is he going to target next, development agencies?
If you keep scrolling down, the projected costs for operating this thing are estimated between $40 - $7000USD per month.
What if I instead buy a cheap 10TB hard drive and crawl at a more relaxed rate on a commodity PC at home? The cost goes way, way down after the initial investment, to near zero.. after one year the amortized H/W costs would be around $30 per month.
Additionally, 1 gigabit+ FTTH unmetered symmetric fiber Internet lines are ever more available at a competitive price.
If you're going at it this way then it's easy to male it worth it
8 gigabit unmetered symmetric fiber for 50e a month
500e initial one time purchase for a ryzen 6800u in mini desktop factor form with 32 gb of memory and 512 nvme gb drive.
Proxmox installation.
Electricity at 0,017 kwh with a 15w cpu.
You can now hosts dozens of such projects. Upgrades for later include : an UPS for eventual power cut or surge, a small NAS for mass storage, a second mini desktop for Proxmox redondancy and replication.
Since fiber lines have becomes the norm self hosting stuff at home has been a breeze and a joy for small projects.
Extra bonus : jellyfin, pihole, home assistant, and all sort of other goodies can easily get a spot on that proxmox.
> Cloudflare CDN bandwidth is free of charge
free of charge, until sales shows up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Also, unless something's changed, the free tier only technically covers "web content". Going outside HTML and related material directly supporting the display of ordinary web pages (javascript referenced by your HTML, some light image serving, CSS) puts you outside what's covered by the TOS. You can't count on it for that at all.
IIRC that also goes for the other "self serve" plans, so includes paid plans. You need an enterprise plan (probably $5k+/m) to distribute non-Web-page-related files without violating the TOS. People often get away with it as long as they don't go too wild, but you're in even riskier territory than one already is using non-enterprise Cloudflare.
Cloudflare does allow R2 (& some other "Developer Platform" services) for non-HTML content. They made some TOS changes in the past to be more explicit about it.
wait a minute the docs say (https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2)
You can use R2 for multiple scenarios, including but not limited to:
Storage for cloud-native applications Cloud storage for web content Storage for podcast episodes Data lakes (analytics and big data) Cloud storage output for large batch processes, such as machine learning model artifacts or data sets
It's not "until sales shows up", it's until regulators start causing problems for Cloudflare because you are using Cloudflare infra to host a grey market online gambling website.
Yeah, it's very much a "try it, first one is free" type of business.
We have also published our tool to mirror the WordPress repository. We took a different approach. Our tool, Morpheus, mirrors the exact WordPress API. It fetches and maintains only the latest versions of plugins, themes, and the WordPress core. This limits disk space considerably.
There’s also a plugin that connects to WordPress.org by default but falls back to Morpheus if needed.
We’re still working on improvements. Right now, we only support English-language updates, but we’re adding more languages and features. Our goal is to support the entire API.
https://github.com/blogvault/morpheus
This also exists - https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
Bluehost operated a plugin mirror for a while, and published all their code.
Maybe they could just host the newsletter and contact form plugins to cover 97% of WordPress sites and email other plugin updates to the remaining 3% on a weekly basis?
What's that pg quote about the internet routing around such and such?
> The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Apparently [0] John Gilmore [1] said it.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/?amp=1
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)
Unfortunately, with the sizes of data these days, this isn’t remotely true, if it even ever was.
centminmod itself is pretty great if you want a stable easy lemp stack for EL. And makes WP management easy as well
I feel like the solution to wordpress-the-org being mismanaged is not to build better replacement infra around wordpress, but to build better publishing tools that don’t burn a mysql connection and require php get executed on every pageview.
WordPress has literally millions of Web sites in production, tons of add-on software, and an ecosystem of companies and people providing solutions for it. Suggesting that the solution is "well, just start from scratch with something else" is unlikely to get you very far.
It is far easier and more likely that the community around WordPress would rally around replacing WP.org than starting over from scratch with a new toolkit. Some people might flee WP altogether, but the majority of people and companies just want to get things done - not seeing them having a lot of tolerance for or interest in having to start again from square one.
Bad software gets popularised all the time, there is nothing wrong with having alternatives and having more choices. I strongly think we need some good alternatives to Wordpress, as someone who has been in the publishing industry in the last decade.
Also, Wordpress doesn't scale well (without getting expensive), the code is bad, it is poorly managed, security issues are all over the place. It's about time we got some alternatives.
There are already an unfathomable number of WordPress alternatives.
...but they are all doing it wrong just wait until I publish my new and better version now enhanced with the new xyz buzzword. /s
There is no reasoning with people like this.
>Suggesting that the solution is "well, just start from scratch with something else" is unlikely to get you very far.
To be fair, the first and best solution most people in these parts have is "Fork it, I'm going to make my own Linux distro." or something along those lines.
No, they don't get very far but I will credit their consistency.
The solution to wordpress-the-org being mismanaged is to sort out the org management.
Amazingly stupid take. Sorry to be blunt but I'm so tired of seeing these. Every thread about WordPress on Hacker News devolves into someone who obviously doesn't work extensively with WordPress, ranting about how bad the code of WordPress is.
So this is the year 2024, and something amazing called a CDN has been invented. PHP does not get executed on every pageview, nor does a Mariadb connection get burned. If you are building a website or web application at scale with any framework or platform, a big part of your job is to architect it such that everything which can be cached, is. You may also employ tools like Varnish or transients. The underlying design principles are universal and whether you're building on top of WordPress or something else doesn't matter that much - in fact many experienced WordPress developers are accustomed to serving multiple millions or tens of millions of users per month, so the ways for making this work are pretty mature.
No impossible but hard work.
I guess you MVP would be something that could do simple brochure websites and be easy to extend. Design it so it is easy to install for individuals or web hosting companies. Maybe plan ahead for things like multi-site, blogging, eCommerce. etc
With all the competition and even the MVP is going to be a lot of work, especially since the average user won't be very technical.
> publishing tools that don't burn a mysql connection and require php get executed on every pageview.
Has anyone tried to use Wordpress as a static site generator, with a few dynamic-content functions moved to Javascript against an API for alternative open-source server (or even another Wordpress instance)?
What's wrong with opening a MySQL connection on every page view?
Unlike PostgreSQL, MySQL was specifically designed to handle a very large number of short-lived connections. A properly configured MySQL daemon can handle tens of thousands of connections per second. If you're still opening and closing too many connections for that, MySQL supports using Unix domain sockets instead of TCP, and PHP supports persistent connections -- a sort of ad hoc connection pooling system.
There are many issues with WordPress and its ecosystem, for sure, but database connection handling isn't one.
There was an effort made and it was acquired by Automattic https://frontity.org/
I think it’s forking Wordpress to get rid of the madman who is bdfl while not being actually being benevolent. Who is he going to target next, development agencies?