CMS hosting
One of the major concerns I have with running my own CMS like Joomla or Drupal (or blogging software like WordPress for that matter) is keeping it up to date. These kinds of tasks are often seen as annoying busywork, and nobody wants to break a site that is working already, but having your site broken into and/or defaced via the CMS is a definite possibility.
This has happened to WordPress quite a bit, which is one reason I advise people to use a hosted service if at all possible. The makers of WordPress do their hosting, and you can find support on lots of low-cost web hosts.
Any recommendations for sites providing CMS hosting (including applying security updates)?
February 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Hey Robert,
Where I work, we’ve begun to provide free blogs for all our clients and as an administrator I’ve had to deal with the pains of keeping 2000+ instances of wordpress up to date (with as little headache, and as much automation, as possible). I ended up just allowing the users access to their wp-content folder (for themes, plugins etc.) – The rest of the blog is locked down, this way I know exactly what I’m dealing with during the automated updates.
It’s not perfect yet, but we are working on it. It’s one of the things which defines us a niche hosting, rather than just a small general purpose hosting company. We provide our target audience with the things they need to run their photography (for example) website, and we provide CMS’ & blog admin interfaces, but limited access to the actual data on the server, which allows us to take the software update burden off their hands.
The converse to this is a photographer who gets godaddy account, buys a nice looking flash site (with CMS) from someone, gets wordpress installed, etc. and then has to manage their own software updates (or get someone who knows what they are doing)… and if something breaks, they don’t really have anyone to point the finger at except themselves. In the end they are wasting their time on areas which don’t directly apply to their actual business.
As for your question about CMS hosting. I’m not sure I understand how this would be used. Would they provide website hosting with a CMS backend to control your website? There’s google pages and sites like that, is that what you mean?
-Nick
February 5th, 2009 at 12:19 am
The idea is to use a CMS for a corporate website to make updates easier for salespeople, etc.