This is a follow-up question from Twitter to the HTML Template System post. I’ll copy it here for archiving purposes, maybe someone can get value out of it.
It’s a ‘depends’ answer again 🤡
First of all, performance. You can’t run thousands of domains on WordPress with high (crawl) traffic, unless you have tons of servers.
WordPress really sucks when it comes to performance. Tons of DB access.
Running your own ‘CMSes’ gives you flexibility. I can roll out updates to all sites at once, not having to care about different installations.
It’s also a ‘do what’s needed’ approach. It’s minimal. The template code for the lander above is pretty simple. No extra fluff.
I also know exactly what’s happening under the hood. No surprises all of a sudden.
Especially when cloaking I don’t want some leaks I didn’t know about.
Regarding VPS: I’m barely using VPS, only dedicated servers. Unless it’s a very very small (test) project, where the price actually makes a difference.
I can get good machines at Hetzner for around 40€. VPS’ with some better specs almost cost the same.
With a dedicated nobody checks how much you consume (bandwidth, cpu), with VPS they are paying close attention.
You don’t want your VPS suspended in the middle of the night because of high bandwidth usage.
Regarding WordPress: I’m using it from time to time. My blog runs on it for example. It’s nice for blog like sites, where you want to add content easily over time.
For everything more or less static, I would always go plain HTML (you could still add PHP).
One easy way to do static sites easily is by creating the site in WordPress, ripping the whole thing to HTML (with wget for example) and then uploading it to your server.
Have to say, I never liked the way WordPress took. It was meant as a blogging platform, that’s when it was great, turned to wanting a full CMS, but ended up being nothing of those.
For a real CMS it’s not flexible enough, for a blogging platform it’s overweight.