Kinsta Blog

WordPress is not without its design flaws, some of which make sense from the point of view of helping non-techies run their own sites (such as making updates easy.) But as someone who has built 100s of sites with WordPress I feel the need to defend it on a few points here:

> You have to let it modify its install. Security-fucking-nightmare.

You don't have to do this, you can set up sane permissions and use the wp cli[0] tool to install updates manually. I prefer to version sites with git and install updates locally, then git pull down on to the live server.

> It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs (which can include self-upgrades), via a non-loopback HTTP request.

A good practice is to set up your own cron job[1] on the server and disable the internal cron in your wp-config.php, like this:

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

Again this is a decision I imagine was made to support shared hosting environments. They've made it easy for 99% of users, which is why it's so popular. We the remaining 1% who prefer to use real cron can edit the config.

> It falls apart under any kind of load, both because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP. You have to put a cache in front of it to be able to handle getting on HN, let alone Reddit.

Just install a page caching plugin of your choice[2]

> You really have to dedicate an admin to it if you want to keep it secure and performant. I still get angry remembering my experience installing, securing, and setting up…

Kinsta | Senior Support Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE | https://kinsta.com/

Kinsta is a modern cloud hosting startup focused on WordPress hosting. Our awesome, young, and motivated team is scattered across the globe: Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Our client base is growing steadily and we’re looking for a competent support engineer with exceptional communication skills who can provide enterprise level technical support to our customers via our support system.

Our Support Engineers must know WordPress deeply. All we host is WordPress and we have the best support team in the business (even if we do say so ourselves). While you don't have to be a full-fledged WordPress developer to be a Kinsta Support Engineer, you do need to know the WordPress database and file/directory structure as well as the wp-config.php file like the back of your hand.

A basic understanding of or familiarity with the following technologies is also a must: Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DNS, CDN, and caching (object and page).

This is a fully-remote role. Our Support Engineers can work from anywhere they have reliable Internet access. We always use the latest version of everything: PHP 7.2, NGINX, Ubuntu 18.04, Linux containers, Google Cloud and more, so you’ll be able to work with a bunch of exciting technologies and use them every day!

This position offers a great deal of flexibility, responsibility, competitive salary, and opportunity for growth for the…

7 brought a huge speed boost. (typically 100% or more without any code change required).

Not specific to 7, but 2 things I think have helped a lot are:

* PSR standards
* composer packaging

Initial PSR work helped define some package interop standards. I'm not sure how useful ongoing PSR work today is (no doubt there's some incremental benefits?).

Composer is a great package manager, and helped usher in a lot more sharing/reusability of common components.

Laravel bundles a number of Symfony components, for example (many frameworks do).

The speed alone in 7 was big, and we've seen some more incremental improvments in 8 and 8.1 and 8.2. It's hard to find current benchmarking tools that compare the 5 series with 7 and 8. I found one showing 5->7 on a mandelbrot run.

* PHP 5.0 was 251s

* PHP 5.1 was 87s

* PHP 5.6 was 29s

* PHP 7.0 was 15s

* PHP 7.1 was 9s

The 'experimental JIT' work (at that time) yielded 4s.

That benchmark was from 2016, so... way out of date now, but other numbers I've seen were 7.1->7.4 was another ... 10% improvement on average, and depending on workload, you might see another 10-20% improvement from 7.4->8.0.

Kinsta has some interesting useful benchmarks on 'real world' apps

https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks

Been using PHP since 1996, and ecosystem, community, performance all continuously improve year over year.

Other people have recommended getting into support, and it really is a good option to consider.

A lot of the suggestions here are a bit more long term. There are entry level support jobs in tech that will give you valuable experience, _now_, for a pathway to engineering roles. Many companies will also give you a budget to buy courses, books, conference tickets, etc. Staying in support isn't a dead end, anymore, either. Remote companies will try to pay you based on location, but salaries can get very high once you stack up experience (120k+/year).

Regardless of future plans, you'll have an advantage over trying to learn while doing unrelated work.

Here are a few listings as an example:

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness-engineer/

https://kinsta.com/careers/

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/listing/2603610

https://system76.com/careers

If you want to talk more about it, lmk, and I'll email you.

While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable.

If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else.

I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3], Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out.

[1] https://wordpress.org

[2] Just email me at help@madpony.co for information

[3] https://kinsta.com

[4] https://pantheon.io

[5] https://www.presslabs.com

If I read https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ correctly, the global market share of browsers is 77% Google Chrome.

Safari only makes up 8.87% of the global share (and Firefox is 7.69%).

From a mobile perspective and limited to the US - https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held-by-mobile-browsers-in-the-us/

Safari makes up only 54.87% of the mobile browser market and chrome makes up another 38.95%.

Another set of graphs - https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

Even if every safari user switched (desktop and mobile), it still wouldn't do much more than double the marketshare and yet remain a small fraction of what Chrome has.

I find it difficult to say that iPhone safari is the reason that Firefox is having trouble when overall, iPhone safari has less of an overall market share than Firefox currently has.