Absolutely. The other day, I took my slow Wordpress server hosted at Vultr on bare metal (£200/pm) and put it on a server at £500 per month and even after doing all the performance tuning I could with MySQL and PHP I couldn’t notice a difference in speed when I was on the back-end where Cloudflare wasn’t caching it.
I then tested on a lower performance server which costs £80 per month at Vultr and again couldn’t detect any difference when in the back-end.
No matter what performance tuning I done, I couldn’t make it work faster for us. But at least I am on an £80 server instead of a £500 server I guess.
I don’t work for Automattic but after spending years trying to “save money” on wordpress hosting I agree just spend the extra cash for a proper managed soloution. Life is too short to spend optimizing page load for your marketing site when its already a solved problem
There is a worry that I have about switching to a company like yours…
What really happens if you decided you didn’t like the products a website sold?
…Would you give them the time to move and take their backups with then or would you immediately hit the delete button on their data?
These are the reasons we switched to self-hosted Wordpress in the beginning. You don’t need to be on HN for long each day to see the same stories being told continuously about how the big guys treat the wee people.
Does wordpress.com used a forked version? Last time I remember that the custom themes were limited for the hosted solution. Maybe this was for performance reasons?
I've got a client using LearnDash, BuddyBoss, WPML, ACF and Woo for their subscription platform. It's dog-slow on the uncached pages, even on a very beefy server with only 5 concurrent users, choking the database apparently. Serving only 2 countries so don't need a CDN per se. (Why) Would this be faster on wp.com?
I just noticed WP.com Business tier exists recently. It’s a no-brain, indeed. On Thursday I signed with you guys and planning to move my site today. (Wish me luck!) Moving will save me ~90% of what I was paying for a managed VPS.
I then tested on a lower performance server which costs £80 per month at Vultr and again couldn’t detect any difference when in the back-end.
No matter what performance tuning I done, I couldn’t make it work faster for us. But at least I am on an £80 server instead of a £500 server I guess.