Spacefast: Automattic’s New Static Hosting  🔗 **Source:** [Spacefast: Automattic’s New Static Hosting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REtN7aXwBLA) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [static-hosting, automattic, spacefast, wordpress-static-sites, agentic-deployment, cloudflare-alternatives] > author: WP Minute Tutorials > source: WP Minute Tutorials (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REtN7aXwBLA > date created: 2026-09-29 10:32 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: Spacefast: Automattic’s New Static Hosting (Cloudflare/Vercel Alternative?) > ## 🧭 Table of contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning styles assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO analysis](#️-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > - [🔄 Refactor appendix](#-refactor-appendix--spacefast-automattics-new-static-hosting-cloudflarevercel-alternative) > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened.** WP Minute Tutorials published a 15:00 first-look video on 2026-09-28 (697 views at capture) of Spacefast (spacefast.com), a hosting product from Automattic. The narrator builds three test projects: a static landing page, a full-stack to-do app, and a static export of a local WordPress site. The narrator calls it a "preview video," not a deep dive. > - **Caption note.** The auto-captions render Automattic as "Automatic" throughout, the product mostly as "Spacefast" but once as "Space Fast," and garble several other terms: "Gentic" and "Agility Builder" (likely "Agentic" and "Agentic Builder," referring to Automattic's AI site builder in the Studio app), "S2" (an attempt at S3), and "Superbase" (Supabase). This analysis uses the metadata and description form "Spacefast" and preserves caption spelling only inside quote blocks. > - **The claim.** Spacefast is a simpler alternative to Cloudflare and Vercel for developers who don't want a large infrastructure console. The narrator reports a Free tier, a $5 per month "Go" tier, and a team tier from $15 per month, and says the $5 entry price matches Cloudflare's paid Workers plan. These numbers come from the narrator's read of the pricing page and aren't checked here. > - **What it does, as shown.** Deploys from a zip drop, a Git push, or the Spacefast command line. Hosts static sites (Astro is named in the docs), full-stack apps with storage and a MySQL database, and static front ends for WordPress through a plugin. Agent connections are a first-class feature, and the dashboard tracks which agents are connected. > - **Why it matters.** It's Automattic entering the static and agent-built site market that WordPress hosts are losing sites to. The narrator's thesis: people who leave WordPress for bespoke JavaScript sites also leave behind the application layer (users, permissions, content tooling), and Spacefast tries to rebuild some of it. > - **Key stakeholders.** Automattic (vendor), the narrator and The WP Minute team (publisher, unnamed on the transcript apart from editor Eric Karkovack), agencies moving clients to static or agent-built sites, WordPress hosts, and the maker of the Simply Static plugin that the Spacefast plugin installs. > - **Risks and tradeoffs.** Three features (storage, database, users) are labeled beta. The narrator couldn't get the WordPress export to work a second time, couldn't get email magic-link auth for their app, and says the testing ran against localhost, not a public HTTPS domain. Every result is one person's first run on an early product. > - **Bottom line.** Worth watching, too early to rely on for client sites. The static and full-stack paths worked in the demo. The WordPress static path is the one to re-test on a real domain before drawing conclusions. > ## 📖 Main content > **The pitch.** The narrator first assumed Spacefast was a static site builder, then decides it's a hosting and platform play aimed at the same buyers as Cloudflare and Vercel. The narrator's framing of Cloudflare: mature, second only to Amazon or Google Cloud in breadth, and hard to work with unless you know infrastructure. Spacefast, in the narrator's view, simplifies that experience and should stay in that lane. The narrator notes it may just be early, and that the dashboard doesn't overwhelm the way Cloudflare's does. > **Pricing and publishing.** Free to start, $5 per month for Go, $15 per month and up for teams. You deploy by dropping a zip of HTML or an app, by connecting Git, or by pushing from the command line. Treat the prices as reported, not verified. > **Agents first.** The narrator says the docs and dashboard push you to copy instructions and hand them to an agent. The dashboard shows which agents are connected and what they're doing. Connectors are "limited to the big players" (the narrator names Google and Cloudflare), with webhooks, account variables, and secrets alongside. Each project is called a "space." > **Three projects tested.** > - **Static site.** Built with Codex plus the Spacefast command line from a prompt asking for a landing page for a WordPress web agency. It deployed without trouble. The project view shows files, builds, domain registration, traffic routes, environment variables, 404 pages, favicons, Google Analytics, and custom header JavaScript. The narrator pressed the agent for a blog model. It first suggested WordPress, then agreed to ingest Markdown files and deploy through a GitHub Action. The narrator also says the docs cover hosting an Astro site. > - **Full-stack to-do app.** Built from a one-line prompt, storing tasks in a MySQL database that Spacefast provides. Storage (which the narrator compares to Amazon S3 and Cloudflare R2), the database, and user management sit under a beta label. The narrator pins their confusion on auth: login options had dropped to a wordpress.com login (an earlier build had a Gravatar toggle), and the agent said Spacefast auth was for people logging in to Spacefast, not for an app's own users. A Google app connection could presumably supply Google sign-in. > - **Static WordPress.** Built locally in the WordPress Studio app, using Automattic's AI site building tied to wordpress.com credits. The Spacefast plugin installs Simply Static. One deploy pushed about 1,700 files and took a long time. It worked once and the narrator couldn't repeat it, in roughly seven tries. The narrator notes localhost isn't a real HTTPS domain and wonders whether Simply Static Pro is needed. > **The WordPress angle.** The narrator's scenario: run WordPress privately (on a desktop or behind a firewall), publish only the static output to Spacefast, and cut both cost and public exposure. The narrator says this is what many people will want once it's reliable. > **The auth angle.** The narrator treats user management as the underrated part of WordPress. People leaving for static sites end up buying a CRM billed by seat or building auth on something like Supabase (the caption says "Superbase"), which adds another infrastructure layer to manage. Spacefast appears to understand this, with wordpress.com and Gravatar as a possible identity layer. > **Contested or unverifiable in this source.** Prices, the Simply Static ownership detail (narrator: co-founder of the Ollie theme, "I believe"), the beta status of each feature, and the claim that the WordPress export is unreliable versus misconfigured are all unconfirmed. The narrator describes several results as possible "user error." The narrator also says Automattic didn't ask the narrator to cover this and that they asked for access on their own. > ## 🗒️ Notes > #### ⏱️ [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REtN7aXwBLA&t=0) What is Spacefast > - Announces a preview of spacefast.com from Automattic, the comp [00:00:00] Spacefast. We're about to find out, or at least give you a preview of spacefast.com brought to you by the makers of wordpress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and so much more. That's Automatic. It's their latest offering into which at first I thought was just a static site builder. And I shouldn't even just say just a static site builder. Lots of people are now moving to static site agentic building processes. Wordpress is certainly in the crosshairs of that movement. Lots of you probably watching this have already moved on and here just to hate on anything Automatic and Wordpress. Let's dive into taking a look at Spacefast, spacefast.com. As I mentioned, a lot of stuff on the home [00:00:42] page here for you to digest. It looks like a way to compete against the Cloudflares, the Vercels, the static hosting solutions that have dominated the market now for the better part of over a decade building out these technologies. The problem with Cloudflare, as much as a lot of people are really enjoying that stack, is its infrastructure. It's big, mature infrastructure. When I think of Cloudflare, I think it's second to something like an Amazon Cloud or a Google Cloud where there is just a gazillion things happening in it. And if you're just not seasoned in infrastructure, well, now you're challenged with just figuring it all out. Spacefast looks to be the answer. Looks like they're dumbing down the [00:01:26] experience, and I think that's a good thing. I think it separates them apart. Now, it could also be super early on with Spacefast. So, there's not a lot of stuff. Certainly not like your head doesn't blow up like when you look at Cloudflare's dashboard. But I think they should stay in that pocket, right? Let's do the infrastructure stuff at big infrastructure solutions, and maybe Spacefast can be the easier to use infrastructure play. Okay, simple pricing, free. You can start for free. You can get an account for free. You can start playing with it. Go, which is five bucks a month, which is the same entry point to Cloudflare if you want their Their their worker services starts at $5 a month. And then plus if you need to bring in a team starting at $15 a month. Again, this is infrastructure. It says publisher how publish however [00:02:09] you like, drop files in like a zip file of HTML or an app, whatever, drop it in, it'll deploy it and host it and connect up to get with it or you can push right from your command line. I think what a lot of people are doing now is moving away from WordPress and a lot of the the tooling around WordPress including some hosting. But that's like an application layer and I think that when they move to something like a Cloudflare or Vercel you start doing these more bespoke JavaScript solutions or static pages, your support and hosting now is from infrastructure. They don't have all of the soft, easy-to-use tooling like WordPress gives you, like WordPress the application gives you and a lot of WordPress hosts give you. So, let's go ahead and dive in. Enough of that spiel. [00:02:52] I have three mini projects. I'm calling this a preview video. This is not a deep dive video because I'm not an expert on Spacefast. Yeah, plus I think it's still pretty early days for things to get totally up and running. Very easy, clean, easy interface, dashboard's easy, there's nothing complicated. Spaces is to projects, right? You have a project, it's a space, that's what they call it. A few different things that can happen is you can track and see what your agents are doing, which agents are connected, what's happening with agents across the board. And they're definitely leaning into the agent side of this first and foremost. You'll see it in like every piece of documentation, everything that you're touching, it's like, "Hey, don't even want to read this, copy and paste this [00:03:34] and give it to your agent." Like they know that everything is just let me dump this off to the agent and have the agent do it. So, they're doing a great job with that. There's a set of connection connectors which is I mean, I don't want to say fairly limited, it's it's limited to like the big players, Google, CloudFlare, even. Um And you can connect up your Spacefast account to do the different things that these different services offer. So, connectors, I'm I'm sure they'll have a lot more as time goes on. Webhooks, of course, your account variables, if you need to store uh variables and secrets, um you can push from a Git repo, you can drop a file, set of files here, and then just go ahead and create a space and [00:04:17] start uh working with your thing. So, I think that's the ease of use that they're trying to do. Every time, this is the second run through I've done of this uh of this uh recording because I I messed something up before. Whenever I go into either the drop or push screen, I'm not sure what it is, it creates this new space. Now we have four spaces. We started with three. Uh that's all that matters to me. So, let's go ahead and delete this just to show you how to delete a space. So, now that space will be gone. The design stuff is still kind of quirky, like I think it's kind of cool, but also like these sort of hand-drawn icons kind of get like at first I was like, "What is that?" It's a lock, right? This is not published basically to to the web. [00:05:01] Three projects, we have a WordPress site, we have a full-stack app, and we have a static site because that's what you can host with Spacefast. You can do the static site like I've built, and I'll show you in a second. You can do a full-stack app, which I'll show you. And of course, you can do a static WordPress site, which I had a lot of issues with, but it does work. I'll kind of go through that, and I think like when that is all ironed out, this is what a lot of folks are be are going to be looking for. Host a WordPress site internally or somewhere on your desktop or on a sort of behind a firewall, and then publish your static site to Spacefast to not only decrease the cost, but decrease the [00:05:44] overhead and exposure that leaving a WordPress site on the web um incurs. [clears throat] So, let's start with the first project I did. This is interesting. This screen is generating preview and it's showing a WordPress logo, which tells me that this is probably built on on Automattic's cloud infrastructure, which hosts a lot of the managed WordPress stuff along with Jetpack and that they sell to other hosting providers. So, whenever I'm clicking through this, you see a WordPress preview even though none of this is a full WordPress application. So, that means to me that they're borrowing the infrastructure. So, I created this project or this static site through the command line and the power of Codex. I'm not here to show [00:06:27] you like the design or talk about the design. It was a quick, simple Codex combined with the Spacefast command line tool in my terminal and I said, "Hey, I'm a web agency, WordPress web agency, build me a landing page that would attract customers." Boom, that's it. I just wanted to test something and get it onto Spacefast, which it did. No problem, really easy. If I browse this, you can see here's all the files. It's just a static site hosting on Spacefast. I pushed really hard in my in my prompts to see what would happen if I kept asking it for a sort of like a blogging model. Like, how can I have a blog? And the first thing it did was might want to consider WordPress. >> [laughter] [00:07:08] >> And Spacefast tool was recommending it for the for those reasons. But, I did get it to a point where it would it agreed to say, "Hey, we can also just ingest .md files. We can trigger a GitHub action and it'll deploy a blog based on, you know, the .md file that's deployed to to the repo." Which is really cool. In fact, if you search the docs, you can host an Astro site here at Spacefast, which is really interesting. And it's either a jab or it's just like, "Hey, man, this is the world of hosting. You want to host it here, you can host it here." And I think that's really cool. And I think a a way to say that, look, there's a lot of people jumping ship to Astro, hosted at SpaceFast. And then, if you still have WordPress sites, or you want to elevate that site to a WordPress [00:07:51] site, you can host a static front end to a WordPress site here at SpaceFast. So, really interesting. You have all of the typical stuff you need to host your static files here. You can connect to GitHub. You can, of course, see the code that we already looked at. You can see the builds that that you deploy. You can register domains. You can do traffic routes. Again, you can do more environmental variables here. And they have this suite of customization, um, which is, I guess, the theme of SpaceFast itself, which is a little confusing. And [clears throat] then, like 404 pages, favicons. And then, you can do your Google Analytics and custom JavaScript stuff that you want to throw in the header. So, this is, I mean, for something that's pretty early days, [00:08:33] there's a lot of stuff here. And it's And it's looking pretty good. Let's go to the next example. Just a super simple, like, make me a to-do app. That's it. I was just like, make me a to-do app in JavaScript that we're going to host and save to the database. So, I'll say, "Matt's second item." We'll add that task. And this is where some of the confusion came in. And again, it could be user error. But, if we go to the left-hand side, uh, you'll see three things that are still in beta. And maybe this is the reason why, cuz it's still in beta. So, we have storage. If I wanted to upload stuff to that to-do list to do list, to doist is the app that I use, to do list, and save those files here, uh, SpaceFast has storage. This is the equivalent to, say, Cloudflare's S2. Can't remember. Amazon S3, Cloudflare [00:09:18] R2. I think is is is the nomenclature. Um, so, you can store files here. Has a MySQL database, which you can see right here, Matt's second item was added to that very simple database. And you can track that stuff, and it's really cool. So, if you want to build something that is a client dashboard, that is, you know, just like a full sort of stack app, you can do it right now with Spacefast. The thing that got me confused, and it it has changed since I initially built this to-do app, is there wasn't another another toggle for Gravatar login. Right now it's down to wordpress.com login. And I prompted the tool to research for this for me and figure out how to create [00:10:00] the authentication for that app, like basically add a new user, user gets the email, or the magic link, and they can sign in. It said it couldn't do that. It couldn't replace that. It wasn't meant for that. It was meant for users logging in to Spacefast. I don't know if the agent knew all of it off the top of its head. Can I say that? It didn't work. I could register a Google app and connect that up to this, and presumably I could have a Google sign-on to this app, but the Gravatar and wordpress.com thing is interesting when you start to think of wordpress.com and and Gravatar as the authentication layer, which I think I feel like they've been trying for that forever with Gravatar, and and this might be the thing that Gravatar [00:10:42] shoehorns in. But again, presumably you you could have your user authentication and management here, which is pretty big, because that's what WordPress provides, which is like totally overlooked and undersold when it comes to building stuff with WordPress, especially those people who are moving off to static sites, and either getting some kind of third-party CRM back-end, which charges by user seats, or just has weird permission structure, or you then go to that infrastructure layer, which is something like a Superbase, and now you're kind of, you know, rolling your own authentication. Of course, they handle it, but now it's just like another infrastructure thing that you're managing, whereas WordPress has it built in. But Spacefast understands that, and they have [00:11:25] uh users, which will eventually be a lot easier to use. Third case is WordPress static hosting. Now, this is the one where I had the the most issues and I just don't know if it's ready for prime time yet. So, I'm in the Studio app. This is what I use to build this example site. Uh this is another experiment. You can see some other videos that I've made about Studio, but they now have a Gentic building uh connected up to wordpress.com where you buy credits from and it's uh Automattic's Gentic play at at building websites and I built this example WordPress agency site locally on Studio, but that's not the uh that's not the lesson here. The lesson is is I [00:12:07] installed the Space Fast plugin, which also installs the Simply Static plugin, which is a third-party plugin by one of the co-founders of uh Ollie theme, I believe. I'm interested to see how long they continue to recommend this plugin, if not buy this plugin perhaps or fork it all into the Space Fast plugin. And I was able to deploy it once and it took forever. It pushed every file of WordPress up to Space Fast, uh which you can see down here. It's got 1,700 files inside of Space Fast. I've never done static front-end WordPress before, so I don't know if that's the nature of the beast when it comes to deploying to the front end, but it worked once and I couldn't get it to work again. Here's [00:12:50] the caveat uh or here's the the the warning message. I'm doing this through localhost on my site uh on my computer. It's not a hosted HTTPS site with a real domain that's connected to the internet. So, I got to spend a little bit more time there or just use it on a domain that has like password off, you know, blocking the site so people can't browse to the site or whatever. Or Simply Static, you need to get the pro version. I'm not sure. I did deploy it once uh seven times, in fact, but in in testing, but a lot of it was driven through the Space Fast command line tool, which is really good, but much more in-depth than this video should be cuz this video is already [00:13:33] pretty long. But, you can have this static version of WordPress up on Spacefast, which it is, and I built this all locally with Studio and the Agility Builder through wordpress.com. So, again, we're looking at Spacefast coming into the automatic portfolio that can service WordPress sites through static front end once it's nice and clean or you don't have a dummy running the ship. You can build full stack apps, and you can host static apps including Astro. Pretty interesting play from Automatic. That's it. That's spacefast, spacefast.com. Check it out. Interested to see where it goes. Hopefully the team can use some of this as feedback. Would love [00:14:15] more people from Automatic to reach out, especially if you're doing marketing like nobody told me, "Hey, cover this." I just knocked on the door and said, "Please, can I have access?" Sometimes they reach out for WooCommerce stuff, maybe some wordpress.com stuff, but nothing exciting like this, like Spacefast and and their other range of products. So, check it out. spacefast.com. Thumbs up if you like the video. Subscribe to the channel if you want more. thewpminute.com. Please join the newsletter if you want to stay connected to all of the stuff that we publish. There's a whole team here at the WP Minute publishing content, making great podcasts, making great videos, writing good blog posts. Yes, people still read it. And the newsletter is unique every time it comes out. There's real content written by Eric Karkovack, who's our editor and practicing agency owner. So, you get to learn a lot of stuff there. [00:14:57] thewpminute.com/subscribe., Spacefast: Automattic’s New Static Hosting, WP Minute Tutorials, 01m3psgc9vmhwdajnxxms2c0nz.