PSA: Hosting troubles

Quick note on potential problems with some WordPress hosting platforms. (If you’re not currently looking to change hosting, you can probably skip this.)

TL;DR:

Some “managed WordPress hosting” services make life difficult for CiviCRM.

The deets:

Most any web host these days that can support WordPress (or Drupal) can also handle CiviCRM just fine.

But my clients, and several of my colleagues in the CiviCRM community, have had a hard time with a certain category of hosting.

This is usually called “managed WordPress hosting.” Examples include Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable, and others.

These are, to be honest, really awesome platforms for enterprise-level WordPress website development.

The general idea is that, while of course they offer all of the standard web hosting features, they also provide lots of automation that WordPress developers love.

One of those great features is a streamlined mechanism for hosting three versions of a site: one for development, another one for pre-launch staging, and of course the live site.

Unfortunately, that very cool feature often relies on some assumptions that make life easy for WordPress developers, but tend to cause problems with CiviCRM.

What this means for you:

In short, it means you should expect to jump through a few more hoops to get CiviCRM working on these platforms.

I've spoken with other CiviCRM developers, and scoured the online community for other perspectives.

The short story is: I've heard from several very capable people who’ve tried it, and almost none who have actually made it work.

I've got plans to talk this over with a few people at CiviCRM Manchester next month.

Our hope is to come up with some documentation that will do a couple of things:

• First of all, avoid casting aspersions at these platforms, which really are wonderful for what they do.

• Secondly, to help set reasonable expectations for CiviCRM site owners: what’s easy, what’s hard, and what might just be impossible.

In the meantime, if you're considering one of these platforms (or your WordPress developer is), I encourage you to talk it over with your CiviCRM specialist first.

Then, before you make the move with your live site, consider setting up a test site and putting both WordPress and CiviCRM through their paces.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And significant breakage on your live CiviCRM instance is probably better prevented than cured.

All the best,
A.