The fine folks at WPMU have put together an exhaustive list comprising 27 Reasons Why WordPress Crushes SquareSpace Every Time. Now, we may be a little biased because we develop for WordPress, and list is geared toward developers, but site owners and content publishers should read this as well. We are not afraid to admit this: if SquareSpace fits […]
SononaCare, PHP7, CentOS 7, Free SSLs, Piwik and more!
Today we dropped quite a few announcements for our customers. In this blog post we will break down each point individually and go a bit more in-depth on the topics covered. SononaCare We previously performed maintenance and updates to client sites as a courtesy to our customers. The update process, however, has become complex requiring constant attention […]
Internal Changes to Managed WordPress Hosting
The saying often goes, “you can have security or convenience” meaning that secure things are not going to be easy to use and having things easy sacrifices security. That is very true when it comes to hosting. Technology is ever-changing and along the way some growing pains occur. This is the case with the current relationship between PHP 7 and […]
wplift asks: How many plugins is too many? The answer may surprise you!
We could not have written a better clickbait-y headline. There is a common myth that having a lot of plugins on your site can slow it down. wplift looks at this myth and explains why this is not always true. The article is very thorough, covering several concerns about plugins: Plugin impact – does the plugin change one little […]
Custom Plugins vs. your theme’s functions.php file
It is standard practice for us to create custom plugins for our clients’ WordPress sites. We go the custom route (rather than plopping them into the functions.php file) for 3 reasons: Portability – you can change themes and not lose the custom functionality – plus you can switch to a default theme to debug problems and not break everything […]
BIG WordPress Vulnerability Patched in 4.7.2
The release of WordPress 4.7.2 fixed 3 issues which were made known a fourth critical issue with the WordPress REST API which could result in an unauthorized privilege escalation (in normal-people terms: “somebody could post to your site who did not have permission to do so”). The guys at WP Tavern have an in-depth article on the vulnerability. As […]
Remove New Relic JavaScript from WordPress AMP Pages
Having problems with New Relic scripts invalidating your WordPress AMP pages? Add this to your functions.php file: /** Disable New Relic Scripts in AMP Pages */ function disable_newrelic_for_amp_pages() { if ( function_exists( ‘is_amp_endpoint’ ) && is_amp_endpoint() ) { if (extension_loaded(‘newrelic’)) { newrelic_disable_autorum( true ); } } } add_action(‘init’, ‘disable_newrelic_for_amp_pages’); We put this into a plugin […]
Comments: WordPress vs. Jetpack vs. Disqus
We are often asked which system is the best to use to handle comments on a blog or site and the answer is always, “it depends on your needs.” Ben Pines over at Pojo recently published a very thorough article comparing the native WordPress comments with Jetpack with Disqus, easily the three top commenting systems for […]
WordPress 4.x random crashes on nginx/PHP-FPM with SSH2
Hat tip to the Ubuntu bugs mailing list for pointing us in the right direction in solving this problem. Like any good WordPress host we are using SSH keys to provide secure FTP communications for installing/updating our WordPress sites. Recently we noticed a perplexing issue where WordPress 4.x would crash when accessing the Settings screen or trying to delete a plugin. […]
Scary Stats: How we handle the traffic demands for ScaryMommy.com
We hear nightmare stories from clients who are gouged by hosting providers that charge exorbitant fees for bandwidth overages. Often these hosting plans include a small amount of bandwidth per month and charge an additional fee per terabyte leading to hosting bills that exceed $1500 per month. That is outrageous. […]