Jane Wells of the WordPress development team posted an update of the pending WordPress 3.0 release. While all of the 3.0 features are exciting, one of particular interest to us here at page.ly is the MU merge. It has a potential impact on our current and future page.ly customers.
WordPress MU is the multiuser version of WordPress that allows for 1 install to serve many blogs. (Like WordPress.com or Lockergnome.net). In 3.0, the MU version and the normal WP version are merged into a single product and will be able to run in multi-user mode or single mode from the same codebase.
So this begs the question- Will Page.ly support/allow multi-user mode found in the WP 3.0 release?
At this point in time Page.ly provides a very specific and unique solution. We do the technical setup and configuration of a complete hosted WordPress solution and provide core upgrade, backup, and other managed hosting services to our customers. Our customers tell us we are really good the best ever at doing this.
One of our core values here at Page.ly is to give our customers as many of the +’s (theme choice, plugin choice, easy to use) with as few of the -’s (technical setup, upgrade headache, maze of up-sell’s during purchase) of hosting your own WordPress website. With the addition of multi-user/multi-site to WordPress it adds a potential positive to this equation, yet also potential negatives. There has to be a net benefit to all of our customers when deciding what to include and what to limit. An example here is database access on page.ly; you will never see it with our service, because you should never need to see it, especially if you don’t know what you are doing. With MU, while it may be a benefit to a small number of our clients, at this point in time we think the added management, post and comment moderation, spblog suppression, and configuration required of a site owner to run an MU service is not a positive benefit to the majority of current customers and those whom we have identified as prospective future customers.
Of course there are also real business and infrastructure considerations to be made from a service provider side as to the viability of providing a MU solution on a large scale. So the short answer is no. Page.ly will not “allow” multi-site mode on Page.ly installs and will amend the Terms of Service to reflect that. Whether or not we take other actions to limit (at a software or server level) multi-site mode is yet to be decided.
So to sum up the “official position” : Page.ly will not support/allow activation of multi-site mode in the WP 3.0 release at this time.
However this position is certainly subject to change should our current and future customers express a demand for a multi-site hosted solution.
My (Joshua Strebel) personal position on it is this: I will do whatever my customers ask of me that is within reason, falls within “our” core capabilities, is ultimately good for business, and does not in any way negatively impact the peaceful enjoyment of our service by current and future customers. If you folks really want multi-site mode I’ll make it happen. But I will have to ask for your patience as we test, develop, and plan for it, and it will not happen any sooner than our datacenter move (mid-late 2010). This could all be much ado about nothing, but I felt it important to clarify where we stand as customers and resellers alike were asking.
Happy to hear your thoughts, protests, or comments below.
Update April 26th, 2010:
We have moved to our new datacenter and now offer enterprise WordPress hosting plans to accommodate customers wishing to run MU or 3.0 in MultiSite mode.
We do not expect any significant downtime while we make the move, yet please be patient as there may be intermittent outages on a per site basis as we migrate it and the new DNS resolves. Please check your email midweek for more information. And of course a big thank you is in order to our current customers for their trust they have shown in choosing page.ly, and for their patience as we have had a few hiccups in the last week.
