Ready for the next WordPress? Is your webhost ready to let it update? Have you checked whether you have auto-updates working on your particular host? If you originally installed via a one-click you may or may not. Also, if youre still on WordPress 3.x you dont get auto-updates to the 4.x series (not via the WordPress built-in feature; maybe via your hosts proprietary method). More in my post at the web venture from me and +Lisa Mercer, +Southern Cross Web and Social Marketing . #WordPress #g2tw - WordPress 4.1 core software may ship as early as next Tuesday, 16 December 2014. Site owners, are you ready? Plugin developers, theme providers, WordPress site developers, designers, support teams, be aware this is coming down the line soon. It will probably automatically update on many of your sites... but not all! Nowadays an increasing number of WordPress sites are auto-updating. So this may hit your site, or those of your clients, by early next week. The auto-update exceptions often are the shared hosting provider-customized one-click installer versions. Sometimes those basic web hosting control panel, or third-party installer versions of WordPress, use their own odd ways of installing, have custom code in them , and use version control or directory permission setups that can break WordPress own auto-updating. If your site was originally created by an auto-install or one-click installer, like Softaculous, Fantastico, proprietary control panels such as those at DreamHost or GoDaddy, or something like a WordPress image at a VPS provider, you probably have a very cookie-cutter standard installation and may have issues on automatic updates to new versions. Those one-click install WordPress versions did provide a big benefit to new users of self-hosted WordPress (what is sometimes called a Wordpress.org site even thought its not hosted at wordpress-dot-anything!) They let you install it without having to know anything about FTP, MySQL, database paths and password, security nonces, .htaccess files, or any other technobabble, making a full-featured content-management blog-centric site accessible to anybody with a few dollars a month for web hosting and a few dollars a year for a domain name. Available. Not necessarily optimized and secured. We at Southern Cross believe that such one-click WordPress installs from general web hosts are never a good idea for a professional site - certainly not now that WordPress has had its own auto-update capability for over a year. Not all of them break auto-updates, but almost all do provide far too standard an install for our comfort level about your security: A database often just called wordpress, table in that database with only wp- as their prefix, and an admin account called admin. Making you what a mugger would call an easy mark on the street, an easy target for malicious hackers on the web. The bad guys dont care about whats on your site, or how big or small it is, as much as they care about just hijacking another WordPress site and web server to use as part of their zombie botnet army to go after the big targets. So yes, theyre even after your tiny little blog or small business site. And being downlevel on your WordPress version makes you an easier target. If youre using a Managed WordPress product, such as the many excellent, competing, and each differently-focused offerings from DreamHost (DreamPress is.gd/getdreampress), Media Temple (Premium WordPress is.gd/getmtpremiumwp), Synthesis Hosting from the makers of the Genesis Framework Themes, or WP Engine (is.gd/WPEngineSCWeb), then your one-click isnt really a simple one-click - those specialty hosts are behind the scene doing all kinds of WordPress optimization and management for your WP installation. Really a Zero-click: Part of why youre paying them 20-100 dollars per month, per installation, is for their expertise and technical management of performance and security, as well as all updates of WordPress. If youre using your web development firm to manage your WordPress hosting, such as some of our clients do with our own Southern Cross Managed WordPress, then they do that management, monitoring, technical oversight, scheduling updates including decisions as to whether to allow auto-updates to run or to wait a few days for stability and then apply them. You as the client can ignore all this. But if you havent hired a gal or guy who knows WordPress, and youre just running your WordPress site on regular shared hosting, youve got work to do. At least you should be aware of what is happening in the WordPress software release schedule. Whether youre running your site from good hosts like Namecheap Hosting (is.gd/getnamecheap), DreamHost regular shared hosting (is.gd/getdreamhost), Media Temple Grid (is.gd/getmediatemple - a higher-powered cloud-shared near-VPS environment well be using for some things ourselves in 2015), or whatever cheapo hosting you bought, then you need to keep track of these updates. Same is true for Virtual Private Server variations, whether managed, simplifed with semi-management but no control panel like the excellent but somewhat complex-for-nontechies Gandi Simple Hosting (define simple!), and the wonderfully fast-to-deploy, fast-performing SSD VPS droplets from DigitalOcean (is.gd/getdigitalocean) - where if you choose their WordPress Application Image it creates a VPS and a working WordPress install in 55 seconds - but has no control panel whatsoever. You have to make sure that either you install the updates manually, or that the WordPress auto-update feature does work on the particular type of VPS youre using. By the way, we at Southern Cross use nearly every one of the services mentioned above. Whether for our own network of sites, our clients, or both, we eat our own dogfood. The links in parentheses are our affiliate links, and we might get a small commission if you buy a hosting service through them. We used the ethical URL shortener is.gd from +Memset Ltd. for easy-to-remember versions of those affiliate links. In all cases, you pay no more for the service, than if you went directly to the companys website, and in a few cases, such as the +DigitalOcean link, you may get a small bonus. For example at Digital Ocean, you get a $25 hosting credit after a certain amount of use up front. Two of those affiliates were not yet using but are actively evaluating, and know they have very good services: Were not currently using +WP Engine but are seriously evaluating it for one client who wants to take over their own hosting from our in-house management. Same for +(mt) Media Temple, for that same flying free client and for another evaluation. Were likely to put at least a couple of other client sites and/or our own network of sites, on one or both of those services this coming year. Weve used +DreamHost for over a decade for decent-quality, fair-priced, good-support and ethical shared hosting, and we now also use their Amazon S3-compatible DreamObjects Ceph-based storage as part of our automatic backup strategy for all sites hosted at +Gandi / +Gandi.net, at our several Digital Ocean droplets, at a new site of our own +Uruguay For Me expat information network just launched on Namecheap Hosting, and for the sites we still have on DreamHosts own hosting. Though were moving away from using basic shared hosting for almost all of our own sites and clients, onto small VPS-like or mini-VPS Simple Hosting instances at Gandi, or full VPS droplets we manage ourselves at Digital Ocean, there is still a definite role for basic shared hosting, especially on hosts that get it about running a good environment for a mix of WordPress and non-WP sites in one account, along with a decently-run email service. Thus we do still like DreamHosts basic offering, and have been so far happy with what weve seen with +Namecheap hosting too. But on anything like that, you as the site owner, or your tech gal, has the responsibility to keep track of these WordPress updates - and monitor any automation of them. Manually update if there arent any automatic updates enabled. If that isnt what you as the business owner / blogger feel comfortable with, you either need to go with one of the managed WordPress Hosting offerings we suggested, or you need to hire an expert to keep up. Thus you should be looking at moving to Media Temple Premium WordPress, DreamHost DreamPress, WP Engine, or Synthesis (that last one not an affiliate and not currently being evaluated by us, but also well-recommended), so that you dont have to be a techie yet can have a regularly updated, secure, and performance-optimized WordPress site. Either that, or bring onboard a consultant or firm, who for a fair fee, can manage your hosting for you. We dont take on any new hosting clients ourselves, unless they are coming onboard with a commitment to buy substantial social media and/or content marketing work or site development - we do hosting management only as a courtesy to clients of our other services. Thats another reason why weve been investigating good managed WordPress, VPS, and quality shared hosting, so our clients from site-builds who arent continuing to do social spend with us, can transition on to quality hosting that they can manage without undue burden. #Hosting #ManagedWordPress #WordPress #SiteManagement #shareall -- Mark Mercer (goo.gl/iZR0Qw) via Southern Cross Web and Social Marketing (goo.gl/Bdh7lf)
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 02:29:25 +0000
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