Need help explaining WordPress stability

OthelloBloke
(@othellobloke)

16 years, 8 months ago

I administrate a provincial website in Canada for a friend who subcontracts me.

This one particular website is constantly giving us problems – the website will go blank, a file will get corrupted, a plugin will stop working, errors will show on the website, yadda yadda. It’s a constant thing.

We have a load of different sites… most hosted with Hostgator which run perfectly. But this site in question is the only one hosted on this server.

My friend asks me what could his client be doing or what could be happening to cause these constant errors. I told him it could be a bunch of different things such as server outages, data noise on the cables running into the server… or whatever. I tried to impress upon him that it’s not WordPress because of the fact it’s only happening with this site on this one server. He then reasoned that ‘it must be WordPress if it can’t handle power outages or something else etc’.

I used the example ‘you can build a perfect brick house but if the foundations aren’t good then the house will never be quite right’.

Does anyone know of a better way I can put this… to make him understand?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Edward Caissie
(@cais)

16 years, 8 months ago

If you run over a nail and get a flat tire, is it the car manufacturer’s fault?

Granted, he could blame them for not selling the vehicle with puncture proof tires, but he was the one that ran over the nail.

Always remember when you point a finger at something (or someone) you could have three pointing back at yourself.

MichaelH
(@michaelh)

16 years, 8 months ago

Seems like you’ve reasoned with your friend “reasonably”.

Might consider asking HostGator to move that account to a different server to see if that makes a difference.

jon
(@adiant)

16 years, 8 months ago

Duplicated below. Sorry!

jon
(@adiant)

16 years, 8 months ago

Michael: I think Othello is saying that the government is self-hosting WordPress.

Othello:
Having worked with Canadian government sites at all levels (federal, provincial and local), I understand the problem. You may get a lot of resistance with hosting in the U.S. because of U.S. federal rules that violate Canada’s privacy laws. So, be prepared to look for a reliable Canadian web hosting site before pushing this too far.

WordPress has a lot more software pieces required to make it work than your typical web-based application that they may be familiar with. Lots of things are straight HTML, with maybe some Java and, of course, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

But no MySQL database. No PHP code. And much less dependencies on Apache (or equivalent) settings.

WordPress is relatively sophisticated software that needs all these other software pieces to be working properly before you can expect it to work properly.

At the other end of the scale, they may have similarly sophisticated proprietary software from IBM or Microsoft. In many cases, these packages come with all the other (database, etc.) components either bundled or pre-configured.

Open Source software, which WordPress is, has a different philosophy. To install it, you are expected to gather together all the required software components yourself, install them correctly, then configure them based on the needs of the Open Source software. And then plug-ins and other Extras are supplied by others, so you are responsible for being sure the Extras will even work with the current version of your Open Source software (WordPress).

Many organizations, both government and private, are still not ready to accept the responsibilities of (hosting, using, etc.) Open Source software. If they are used to large vendors like IBM and Microsoft fully supporting them, it is a real culture shock. Not that WordPress doesn’t have fabulous support, but no guy in a blue suit is going to come when you call and solve all your problems.

iridiax
(@iridiax)

16 years, 8 months ago

the website will go blank, a file will get corrupted, a plugin will stop working, errors will show on the website, yadda yadda. It’s a constant thing.

Have you checked for hacking? Hacking can be the cause of sudden mysterious errors (like parse errors), and unless you clean it up and close any security holes, files will just keep getting corrupted.

jon
(@adiant)

16 years, 8 months ago

Very good point, iridiax. Hacking is a good possibility.

I was just trying to point out how poorly setup some government web servers are. And they get away with it because their existing web applications are very unsophisticated. Or proprietary and setup to withstand almost any errors in web site configuration.