Well we have hosted 10 small business WP sites per $10 DigitalOcean droplet for the last decade. There are not additional plugin costs on any of them. And there has been no real maintenance needed.
I'm not saying WP is great. Taking over a WP project from someone else can be daunting in tech debt and weird choices. But in terms of having a simple brochure website for businesses that get < 10k weekly visitors, it's pretty quick, cheap, and easy.
Reality check: So you have no forms any user needs to input anything into, because if you had any, then you would need a spam protection, lest your customer gets tons of spam. Cheapest one is probably Askimet, but that costs money for a business. So either you are talking about little blogs, or not businesses. In any case, probably real small sites of purely informational character without user input, otherwise it would cost something. Or you are letting your customers get spammed.
No real maintenance? So either you let your PHP version and plugins become outdated, or you sooner or later have to fix things breaking. Maybe you simply did not notice any breakage, because you don't do maintenance for customers?
A brochure website? Does that mean people enter their e-mail to be sent a brochure? (Then paragraph 1 applies again) Or brochure meaning, that you merely display information on pages and that's it?
I think for small info sites what you describe can be true, but for anything slightly larger not, especially not for small businesses.
Have you ever worked with any SMBs before? This is at least 5 technical levels above their head. Would make as much sense as telling them, "just use this CLI tool".
We're talking about people who will email you from their phone that the website is down, but it turns out it's just their home internet that is down.
Or think that the website disappeared from the internet. When in reality it's now the #2 result in google and they never knew they you could type a URL directly into the browser.
Not really because most of the links in current AI overviews for many queries keep you in the Google ecosystem, such as links to Google Business profiles on Google Maps. And Google has recently changed Google Business profiles to make outbound website links less prominent compared to the paid features on that platform.
Have used supabase a bunch over the last few years, but between this and open auth issues that haven't been fix for over a year [0], I'm starting to get a little wary on trusting them with sensitive data/applications.
> We never distinguished automations from people though, that makes no sense on the internet.
LOL I see you've never sold anything on the internet, ran a website that is supposed to generate leads, or had to gauge the effectiveness of an ad campaign. There is a huge part of the internet that relies on real humans doing things on websites. And ignoring that is insane.
Probably because that's one of the only things you can say to Google these days that will escalate it from an low level support agent on the other side of the world.
Vastly varies on what type of website you have, how many pages you have, and how often they are updated. We routinely see 1000's of requests per minute coming from AI bots and the scraping lasts for hours. Enough to make up 20-30% of overall requests to the server.
What has been democratic about how the internet has evolved over the last 2 decades? Because as far as I can see, the internet has undergone a massive centralization into the hands of a few players with practically no regulation. Especially Google, which can make decisions such as adding AI Overviews to search results leading to millions of websites seeing a ~25% drop in organic traffic in the last few months.
There is nothing stopping other CDN/DNS providers from implementing similar services and tools to what Cloudflare offers. Part of the reason CF has become so popular is because so many of their competitors don't offer nearly the same convenience for routine tasks & protection.
