Options, Not Decisions  ## Metadata - Author: [[Crossword]] - Full Title: Options, Not Decisions - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3a8141ef-086d-4524-b7bf-b99edd0489ee ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Luke's Friday Highlight** - Luke enjoys Fridays when new issues of the repository drop and likes seeing Crossword mentioned in them. - He notes his spoken words read differently and less impressive in print than he remembered. Transcript: Luke Luke, do you know what I enjoy doing on a Friday? Sunbathing. No. Could. But one of the things that I especially enjoy. Going for a run. Definitely not going for a run. Reading your favorite novel. That could be. Jonathan Relaxing by the fireplace? Luke Nope. Jonathan You're missing that this is a rhetorical question. Oh, okay. Rhetorical question, right? Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Go ahead. I'll shut up. Luke One of the highlights of Friday for me is that new issues of the repository drop. Uh-huh. And I was reading the issue, as I do, and then I came down to this one part at the end. And it's always fun. I personally enjoy looking for, like, Oh, was crossword mentioned this week? And then it was like, Oh, wow. Not only was it mentioned, but wow, Luke said, uh, uh, quite a bit in this, this last episode of crossword. And, uh, and when I read it, cause I'm like, it's accurate. Like it's, it's technically, what was said. ([Time 0:00:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f2e2bc81-76bc-4a5b-acf1-fa18a6d2c164)) - **Secure Hosting Alliance's Ambiguous Impact** - The Secure Hosting Alliance aims to raise hosting standards but raises concerns of power imbalance among big players. - Its language about ending the "race to the bottom" causes cynicism about price fixing or monopoly risks. Transcript: Luke So there is a thing that's been launched recently, and the repository did a story on it called the Secure Hosting Alliance. There's an organization behind it called the i2 Coalition. I think I got that right. And so I've heard of this in the past. I don't know much about this specifically yet, but it's interesting for a few reasons. There are a number of familiar faces in it. So it is a collection of hosting companies that are coming together to supposedly raise the standards. Jonathan One of the pieces of language that they call out is like, it's time to end the race to the bottom, right? That's such a thing. It's like for the premium, any business that sells at some sort of premium package, let's end the race to the bottom is so loaded. Right, right, right, right. Luke Well, because who benefits from that? So here's what I found interesting about this. I have really good friends involved in this and not involved in this who have very differing takes on the value of or in value of this. So let's just start with the facts. Look at who is a member of this new secure hosting alliance. A number of hosting companies. Automatic is a member. GoDaddy is a member. So you got two big players right out of the bat, right out of the gate, rather. I have Cricket on my line. Off the bat, yep. Apparently. And then you also have folks like BigScoots, who is not a small player. They're a more medium-sized player. They're a sponsor of Crossword, which we're really grateful for. You have, as the the folks behind security alliance said they have you know hosting from i think this was actually in the article some of the biggest companies all the way down to people With a server in their basement so it's this very like hey we're open to anyone uh it's interesting as i so i'm generally a fan of these types of things. Let's work together. When you've got the biggest players, though, there's almost this, at least a more cynical view is that there's like a built-in imbalance of power, especially if you're talking about Things like ending the race to the bottom. Like, are we talking about price fixing here or setting up monopolies? And they also make references to lobbying and preventing like harmful regulation and generally regulation tends to be things for instance that support the entrance of the interest Rather of the incumbent so the biggest players more so than the small ones so i don't know i found it interesting and uh especially because I have friends who have been actively involved Over fantastic people who are in this thing who I think nothing but positive of. ([Time 0:03:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1ab02cf7-23c5-42dc-8aaf-9baad67043b0)) - **WordPress Security Perception Issue** - WordPress has a poor security reputation partly due to shared hosting environments, which is unfair. - The hope is to change this perception without necessarily raising hosting costs too high. Transcript: Jonathan Mean, I think the generous take is trying to maybe like guard against the host gators of the world, you know? Or maybe, well, you know, there is this, WordPress suffers from this terrible image of being insecure, right? Luke Yeah. Jonathan Because for various reasons, and we all know it's not really a fair reputation, but partially to blame is the shared hosting environment. Luke Was that a pun intended again or no? Jonathan No, we can't jump on the fair pun thing every single time it comes up. That wouldn't be fair. Carry on. And so, yeah, I don't know. I do feel uneasy about it. I wish they hadn't have said preventing a race to the bottom because that's – Right. That was the problematic language. Luke That's the thing. If you cut that out, so that's where I'm like, okay, words do matter. And maybe I'm just being, I've let some, some, some cynicism creep in to me because like, I know many of the people involved and they're great people. Jonathan We want a race to the bottom. We want WordPress hosting to be as cheap as possible, right? ([Time 0:06:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7d333d13-bf58-4f1d-8cbc-4012afbf503e)) - **Start a Minimal Managed Hosting** - Build a hosting company that undercuts others by removing back-end admin, sales teams, and support offerings. - Sell only managed hosting directly where users who know WordPress don't pay for unnecessary support. Transcript: Jonathan Actually, I have this idea. I'm never going to work on it because I don't want to start a hosting business. So free idea, put it out there into the world. I think there should be a hosting company that undercuts all the other WordPress hosting companies. And it's a managed WordPress host. Here's what it does. It sells direct sign straight into your site, you know, InstaWP style. It doesn't have an admin, like a backend for managing billing and backups and things like that, because it actually has that all built into the WordPress admin. And it doesn't have a sales team. It's all inbound to the website. It does marketing, no huge enterprise sales teams. And, and this is the kicker, no support. Every other company, every other hosting company, they really compete on the best support and that puts the, the prices up. What if there was a hosting company that just said, maybe you already know WordPress. Maybe you just have a simple website. Maybe you don't need support. Why would you pay for it? And is still managed, is still kept up to date even, is still secure. ([Time 0:08:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68cf3cb5-f214-4379-bab5-60e3bd190f8b)) - **Spin Up WP's Low-Cost Appeal** - Spin Up WP attracted Luke by allowing low-cost, managed WordPress sites without full-featured support. - It recalls affordable shared hosting, ideal for users not ready to pay high monthly fees. Transcript: Luke Here's the problem though the problem was something like that because this reminds me of spin up wp back in the day were you ever a customer of theirs i am currently a customer so as am i And uh i'm a fan like it and i know what i want as an end user but i also have other hosting uh companies including big scoots i'm a customer of big scoots as well and when you get to it comes Down to like who's your audience and you can say i like the idea oh no support that's fine until you need it. Yeah. Jonathan But, but you've got these like 30, 45, $50 a month managed hosts, right? And then if you want to go a tier down from that, we're not even thinking about HostGator. We're thinking about DigitalOcean and AWS and doing it all yourself. And that's more in the five to $10 a month. I think that there can be something in the $10 to $15, even $20 range, which is managed, but without all of the corporate stuff stacked on top. Luke Yeah, I think you are on to something with that. The thing that I found attractive about spin up initially was this idea of like, I don't want to pay $10, $20 per site. There are some, that's no problem. And also happy to pay more. But like, if I've got something I want to spin up and just like play with something to me, I shouldn't have to be paying this like additional like subscription cost for it. And that's where spin up was suddenly really attractive, which brought me back to the old days of like unlimited on like a shared account somewhere. But it's managed. It's just, you can set up backups, you can decide the level of interest that you have in it. Jonathan But it's not managed in terms of if your server goes down, you're in trouble. It's not managed in terms of if you get heaps of traffic, you're in trouble. You know, like it's not managed in that sense. You've got to be on top of your DigitalOcean droplet or whatever. Luke Maybe the ideal there would be some sort of like, hey, let's call this what it is. This is this level and it's very low cost. And if one of your sites starts to take off, then you come up, then let's just be more honest about what that is. Because the reality is that most people just spinning up a WordPress don't need to be spending like 20, 30 plus a month on it. It's just the value proposition isn't there, but where do they go for that? ([Time 0:09:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f964e91-64bc-41b9-95a4-8bbebfff66bb)) - **WordPress Options vs. Simplicity** - WordPress presents overwhelming options, contrasting with simpler platforms like Ghost. - Future releases could enable more application-specific WordPress experiences improving usability for end users. Transcript: Jonathan Don't think no i think part of the attraction of ghost is uh the simple the interface. And it's very, very... See, you could create a WordPress host that was hyper-specific. Sorry, you get like these WooCommerce offerings. It's got WooCommerce and maybe it's got some forms plug-ins and a few other payment processes, whatever. It's got this package bundle deal. But you still have this WordPress admin interface that can do anything and can do everything. And it is still a complicated sort of system because of that. Who was I talking to? I was talking to a good friend yesterday, Rob Stinson. And we were saying how WordPress is all about, it seems like WordPress is all about giving users options. It's options, not decisions. And Ghost has a different balance of options versus decisions that I think works better for people. Luke Well, and that of course clashes with the, one of the core tenants of the WordPress project, which is the opposite. It claims to be decisions, not options, right? Like let's make some decisions, but it, but it feels, I agree with you. It feels like it's an overwhelming amount of options available because no one, none of us use vanilla WordPress. Like we're going to do something with it. Jonathan He was telling me how he, all he wanted to do was put in some custom CSS into his theme. And he spent an hour trying to figure out how to do that. Eventually, do you know the solution? Type in slash WP admin slash customizer.php and do it there. Luke Oh man What a callback. I am interested to see, Luke, with 6.9 and 7.0 and the work that the AI team has been doing. It feels like WordPress, and especially there's been some interesting recent developments with new editors, alternate editors being available in WordPress. ([Time 0:12:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d922aada-e48f-406e-920b-5bd22e2ce30f))