Tag Archives: Services

7 Best Cheap WordPress Hosting Services (2024 Deals)

[ad_1] Final recommendations After reviewing all these options, here are my top recommendations, based on what I think each host is best suited for: Namecheap – my recommendation for long-term hosting (5-10 years) For anyone planning to keep their website running for several years, Namecheap is hands down the best choice. It’s the absolute cheapest option for long-term hosting, with the 5-year cost of ~$230 and the 10-year cost of ~$475. Despite the low cost, you still get solid features like 10 GB of storage and support for up to 50,000 visits per month. I’ve found that Namecheap offers reliable performance, and if you’re focused on keeping costs low over the long haul, it’s hard to beat. Bluehost – my pick for a 1-year test run If you’re looking to test the waters with a new website for a year, Bluehost is my go-to choice. At $1.99 per month, it’s the second cheapest host for a one-year plan, costing just $23.88 in total. Keep in mind, though, that it gets expensive over the long term. You’ll also get a free domain for the first year, along with easy WordPress installation and solid performance. From my experience and feedback from users, Bluehost has a good reputation for uptime and speed, making it perfect for those wanting to try out WordPress hosting without a long-term commitment. Common sins of cheap hosts This might sound a bit harsh, but these “sins” aren’t necessarily due to bad intentions. They’re just the reality of the hosting market, driven by the constant demand for cheaper and cheaper options. Hosts are more than willing to offer what seems like a great deal upfront, but as the saying goes: if something looks too good to be true, there’s usually a catch. Here are some of the most common caveats you’ll run into with cheap WordPress hosting: 1. The entry price is a marketing myth The low entry price you see advertised is often little more than a hook. Once that initial term ends, you’re looking at a price increase anywhere from 2x to 8x what you originally paid. For example, you might sign up for $3 a month, but when it’s time to renew, you could be paying $10, $20 (I’m looking at you, SiteGround), or more. Always be aware of what the long-term costs will be, not just the first-year promotional price. Here’s one insightful table I can share with you about the price thing that comes from our annual hosting survey. This is what these hosts advertise their entry price is vs what the average user actually pays (I’ve included only hosts with more than 15 votes in the survey): Host Entry price / mo Median price / mo Hostinger $2.69 $7.25 GoDaddy $6.14 $16.50 Bluehost $1.99 $20.00 SiteGround $2.99 $32.00 Namecheap $2.91 $7.00 Some of these prices are not even close to where they were advertised to be, right? 2. No email hosting included A professional email address that matches your domain (like you@yourwebsite.com) is key for any business or project. While some hosts will include this as part of the package, many cheap hosts will not. That means you’ll either need to pay extra for email hosting or set up a separate service for your domain email – an added hassle and cost you might not expect. For example, all high-end managed hosts for WordPress – such as Kinsta or WP Engine – are known for not offering email. It’s hard to blame them, don’t get me wrong, but there are still users surprised that they pay this much for hosting and still don’t get email. Even some budget hosts will give you email only “partially”…kind of. This is what Bluehost says for example: 3. Domain name not included I should have probably led with that. Well, you can’t have a website without a domain, and while many users already have a domain of their own when they search for hosting, many don’t. Having your host throw in a free domain (for the first year) is a nice perk, and especially if the project you’re working on is only a test and you’re not sure if it’s going to pick up or not. Don’t get me wrong, though, a host not offering free domains is not a dealbreaker at all, but still an important additional cost to factor in – roughly $15 a year. When you sign up for a cheap plan, expect to be bombarded with add-ons and upsells for things like premium SSL certificates, automated hourly or on-demand backups, enhanced security scanning, and more. While some of these are nice (like SSL for securing your site), they’re often offered at an additional cost when you thought you were getting everything in the base package. These “extras” can add up quickly, turning that cheap hosting plan into something far more expensive. 5. Low price means key features are missing The reason these hosts can offer such low prices is because they strip out key features or services that you’d typically expect to be included. For example, customer support might only be available via email (and response times can be slow), or advanced features like a web application firewall (WAF) or malware protection could be locked behind a paywall. In some cases, you might even need to pay extra for things like daily backups or a CDN, which are crucial for keeping your site safe and fast. Let’s zoom back out 🔭 Our methodology Choosing the right hosting provider can be challenging, so we’ve developed a thorough methodology to test and review web hosting companies. Since 2009, we’ve reviewed over 50 providers using a combination of expert analysis, real user feedback, and performance monitoring. Our team of experienced reviewers offers honest opinions, while our annual hosting survey provides additional insights from real users. We continuously update our reviews to ensure they reflect the latest information. Our review process starts by signing up for hosting plans and setting up test websites with demo data.

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Using a Registry, Subscribers, and Services in WordPress

[ad_1] TL;DR: I find the using a registry, subscribers, and services very useful when building backend-centric plugins and utilities for WordPress. This post walks through how to do it. After working in with design patterns, object-oriented programming, and WordPress for years, common ways of solving problems are bound to arise. This is how we got object-oriented design patterns to begin with, so maybe this is a WordPress-centric variation of that. Though I’ve written about things such as registries in previous articles (and ones that are not that old even), it’s never a bad idea to revisit the same topic especially when there’s something to continue to add to the previous take. A Registry, Subscribers, and Services Everything described below is to be understood within the context of the WordPress plugin. That is, this isn’t meant to be read as a way to work with any other frameworks, languages, applications, or when using it with any other patterns. Remember that when reading this. Anyway, the general idea behind the combination of these object types if the following: The registry handles all of the subscribers, The subscribers listen for hooks within WordPress (those that exist or even custom hooks), The services do the actual work whenever the subscribe dispatches them. The purpose being there’s a single place to register the classes responsible for dispatching the work. That’s it. Further, this also makes it easy to keep things separate so that if you want to test your services in isolation, it’s much easier because they aren’t necessarily coupled tightly to WordPress. And if they are, then you can mock the data that needs to be passed into a given function and then evaluate the result. This isn’t an article about testing, though, so back to the actual classes. Registry By definition, the purpose of a registry is to keep track of things. When it comes to implementing this pattern in WordPress, the idea is that the registry can keep track of subscribers (which I’ll define later in this article). Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash Further, the idea is that when the time comes, which will likely different for however your plugin is structured, all of the subscribers will be instantiates. To that point, though, you’re likely going to want to do it early in the WordPress lifecycle. That said, here’s an example of how to the code for registering the subscribers: private $subscribers = [ AssetSubscriber::class, // … DeletedUserSubscriber::class, ]; Next, here’s a function for instantiating the subscribers. public function run() { array_map( function ($subscriber) { (new $subscriber())->subscribe(); }, $this->subscribers ); } These blocks can be part of the same function or they can be separate depending on your needs. Subscribers As mentioned, subscribers are the way to: Listen for a certain hook in WordPress Dispatch a Service to do whatever work is intended for the given hook. So assume for a moment you want to do something whenever a user is deleted. You want to instantiate a service via the subscriber whenever this hook happens. Photo by Lee Campbell on Unsplash As an example: class DeletedUserSubscriber { public function subscribe() { (new DeletedUserService())->add(‘delete_user’); } } Note the subscriber is aware of the service (though it maintains no dependency on it as its simply an intermediary between WordPress and the service) and specifies the hook on the service that its instantiating. Services Finally, services are the objects who do all of the heavy lifting in a plugin. This means that if they need to read or write to the database, the file system, the network, process data, etc., it all happens within their context. Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash They may be aware of other classes, they may not be. They may implement an interface or an abstract class or not. That’s really beyond the scope of this post. But the point is that, using the hook from above as an example, if you want to do something when a user is deleted, you do it within the service. For example: class DeletedUserService { public function add(string $hook) { add_action($hook, [$this, ‘deletedUser’], 99, 1); } public function deletedUser(int $userId) { $user = get_userdata($userId); if (false === $user) { return; } // Do work with the user that’s being deleted. } } And that’s the end of it. Once the service runs, control will be returned to WordPress and the application will continue execution as normal. All Together Now Assuming you have a bootstrap file for your plugin, which most do as this is where the required plugin is defined, an autoloader is required, and instantiation of the plugin itself occurs. If you’re interesting in seeing a more complete solution that demonstrates how to use the above code in a practical setting, let me know on Twitter. That way, I’ll know to go ahead and draft up another article. 🙂 [ad_2] Source link

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Castos Picks Up $756K in Funding from Automattic and Joost de Valk to Expand Services in the Private Podcasting Market – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, and other individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth. “On both the individual and corporate investor side I think the investors see the vision that we have for what the Private Podcasting market can mean for Castos and want to help us achieve that potential,” Hewitt said. Private Podcasting is a growing trend where creators and organizations broadcast to supporters in a more intimate format that isn’t open to the public. Hewitt likens them to membership sites, except in audio format. It is often used by people who are running membership sites, courses, or online communities as a way to stay connected with members. “The other application is companies wanting a way to connect with their employees in audio format,” Hewitt said. “Podcasting is perfect for that because it’s mobile-first, on-demand, and can be consumed asynchronously.  We call it the Step Away Experience. Companies that are adopting Private Podcasting internally are giving their team members a way to consume their internal content without being tied to their computer on a Zoom call or glued to Slack.” Castos is developing a mobile app specifically targeted at the private podcasting market. Hewitt’s team is aiming to have the app become a place where people can listen to all of the private podcasts for which they have a subscription. Listeners would simply use the app instead of going through the process of manually subscribing to all their private podcasts via RSS feed. New episodes will appear automatically in the app for subscribers. “For our corporate clients, the ability to white label our app with their own branding/style is a big win,” Hewitt said. “It’s also a much more secure way to distribute private podcast content.  There’s no RSS feed to share around, no files to download (our app is streaming only to offer more security to those files).”  The pandemic ramped up unprecedented interest in podcasting when lockdowns were in place across the globe. Even with vaccines more readily available now, Hewitt said Castos is still witnessing strong growth in the podcasting industry. “There are all the new podcasters in the market now since so many launched podcasts during the pandemic, but now that people are traveling again and commuting to work we’re seeing listenership going up quite a bit,” he said. “This is a trend we expect to continue into the future.” In the past 10 months, Castos has grown to serve nearly 3,500 customers and the team has grown from seven employees to 13. The company’s Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is used on more than 30,000 WordPress sites. Castos is actively hiring for several roles right now, thanks to the new round of fundraising. “All of the funds will go towards growing our team,” Hewitt said. “This will be pretty evenly split between product (designers and developers) and Sales and Marketing roles – more people, more energy, more great minds working on ways that we can better serve our customers.”  Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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