I am at Cloudfest this week, in Europapark in Germany. This is my second year visiting Cloudfest, and I truly enjoy it. Cloudfest reminds you that pretty much all hosts offer WordPress hosting, and because of that, the WordPress community is important at an event like this. I’ve seen many of the usual suspects from the WordPress community, people I also meet at WordCamps. It makes sense to be here because WordPress is the main growth driver for most hosts, and selling products to hosts might be easier for some companies than selling products to customers.
All the big hosts offer WordPress hosting. But next to that, many offer a proprietary solution as well. A website builder; something people can easily set up their website with. Something like WordPress, but usually of less quality and more expensive. For instance: GoDaddy has ‘Go Daddy’s website builder’, and Newfold has Web.com. They all have teams of developers working on these builder products.
And I get it. When people are on one of these products, they can’t leave as easily, so you have a bigger “lock-in”. If you purely look at profits, focusing on the propriety side of your business might make sense. But what if these hosts would match the number of developers they employ on their website builders with an equal number, or heck, even only half of them, to work on WordPress core. Imagine the force of nature WordPress would become!
While talking to these different hosts here at Cloudfest, I noticed that WordPress is their most significant growth driver. In fact, this year, I heard a few hosts say that they basically only sell WordPress now. We often talk about our competitors in the WordPress community: Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix. These are growing faster than WordPress does. But our competitors all offer their own hosting in their plans. For the hosts here, the growth of WordPress is crucial. This makes me repeat my previous conclusion: what if this host would significantly invest in developing WordPress core? Imagine what would happen to WordPress!
It is great (both for me and more people in the industry) to keep looking beyond the borders of WordPress. To see what motivates hosts to invest in closed-source software. To understand their reasons for keeping their website builders around. And to keep talking to them about the wonders of WordPress and pushing them to invest more in it.
Great Thought – What if this host would significantly invest in developing WordPress core? But it is tough for most players as the thought process of a wordpress development team and hosting provider is different.
People use wordpress because it gives more flexibility relative to Shopify or other closed platforms.
So if the hosting companies try to build their own core and make the software closed, the whole open source community might look at alternative options