Woot!

All page.ly websites will be auto upgraded next week sometime after the 3.1 release likely. You may of course upgrade your self through the admin panel now.  Be sure to read our policy on 3.0 Multisite.

Before you upgrade on your own you should:

• Update all your plugins
• Disable all your plugins
• Upgrade WordPress
• Enable plugins 1by 1 and check the site to make sure it is not whitescreened
• It’s not WP3.0 fault, some plugins are just slow to update to new features
• Use our Whitescreen Eliminator to reset plugins if you get locked out.

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I started reading The Referral Engine by John Jantsch and within the first 20 pages, I was hooked. John is considered a guru in the small business industry and has a wallstreet journal best seller titled Duct Tape Marketing. On page 15 of The Referral Engine John writes:

I receive offers for cheap Web hosting almost daily. While the cost of the service in question is almost insignificant, the cost of having my site off-line or hacked could be catastrophic. I choose my service very carefully and put a great deal of stock in the recommendations of others I trust, even though it’s a relatively low-cost item.

Well said sir! (John is not a customer of page.ly) We could sing this from the rooftops but it matters so much more when it comes from wildly successful people who know the dangers of choosing cheap hosting. The old adage is true in regards to hosting, “You get what you pay for”. Unfortunately, we’ve heard horrible stories of poor costumer service, hacked sites, 6k sites on one server, slow load, continuous upsells, etc. These sad stories come from wonderful people who thought they were getting a good deal. Little did they know they would pay with frustration, angst, and confusion. Enough of the bad hosting. As we’ve posted earlier, here is our promise to you:

We will never confuse you with products and purchase options you don’t need or that only serve to pad our bottom line and offer little or no value in return. We will never oversell our server infrastructure at the expense of your website performance. And we will strive on a daily basis to improve our service and support to increase your value per dollar invested with us.

To show how awesome the universe is, check this out- Small world! We might work together.

Plug it in baby

So we are about to implement a new feature at page.ly: System wide plugin updates

Just like we keep your WP Core install up-to-date we can now do the same thing for your all your plugins. Of course you have always had the ability to update your own plugins (Tools > Upgrade .. have you done this lately? you should!), but we can now update any plugin on any site on our service.  So this brings up a couple points I was hoping our customers and readers could help us with.

Sometimes a plugin update will “break” WordPress, and sometimes a WP Core update will “break” because of an outdated plugin.  So the nature of the page.ly WordPress Hosting service is that WP will always be updated on our service regardless, and we figure the latest version of plugins will be compatible with newest versions of WordPress as the majority of plugin authors plan for new releases.

So this begs the question. Do we force plugin updates system wide, or allow customers to opt-out of automatic plugin updates and do it themselves?  The way we see it, since WP will always be updated on our system.. it makes sense (and better security) to ensure that all plugins are as well.

Planned Implementation: Every couple weeks our system will upgrade all plugins on every site. If a forced plugin update nukes a site (a whitescreen) we will deactivate all plugins, and re-enable the half dozen or so we know work and then send you an email that there was an issue with one of your plugins (hard to tell which one) and you can turn them on one-by-one to find the culprit. This whitescreen/compatibility check will be automatic at the time of upgrade.

Are customers willing to trade a the possibility of 1 or 2 of their plugins being disabled if they are not working for the ease of  never having to manually upgrade them + the added security of the entire system being up to date?

Am I rambling, or making sense? What do you folks think?

We all love stickers.

Send us a self addressed stamped envelope (An envelope inside an envelope) and We’ll send you a handful of page.ly stickers + a promo code for a discount when signing up on our service. Analog marketing FTW!

Page.ly
250 S Arizona Ave
Chandler AZ, 85225

Here is a good post describing what’s to come in WordPress 3.0.

Please review our policy on WordPress 3.0 Multisite feature