> Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds.

Having seen a lot of companies and startups doinge exactly that, more of less everyone regrets it. Either you end up with such a lot of traffic through these vendors that you'll regret it financially, or you want to change some specific part of your page or your purchase process, which Shopify doesn't let you change, and you'll end up needing to switch or be sad, or, as I regularly have to (because we don't get the resources and time to switch): try to manipulate the site through some weird hacky Javascript snippets that manipulate the DOM after it loaded.

It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

> Stop self hosting.

Worst mantra of the century. Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging. This is only a good idea for a prototype, and only as long as you'll not gonna run the prototype indefinitely but will eventually replace it. And maybe for one-person-companies who just want to get going and don't have resources for this.

Let me empathize but say, to put it bluntly, they do not have qualified IT Staff. They have 1 or 2 people who understand only basic web server stuff and nothing else. Thus the two week outage.

Paying LearnWorlds + Shopify $30K a year, if it were even that extreme, is cheaper than an engineer and certainly cheaper than an outage over Giving Tuesday, as they found out the hard way. They got hacked and were down for the most high-traffic nonprofit donor day of the year in their effort to save a few bucks. It wasn’t even the plugins, but the instance underlying the shared hosting.

> It's literally always the same. They get you running in no time, and in no time you're locked into their ecosystem: No customization if they don't want it; pricing won't scale and just randomly changes without any justification; if you do something they don't like they'll just shut you down.

You’re also locked into an ecosystem. It’s called Stripe or PayPal. Almost all of that applies anyway. Don’t forget that significant amount of customizations are restricted to streamline PCI compliance, you can do illegal things very easily. Install an analytics script that accidentally captures their credit card numbers, and suddenly you’re in hot water.

> Leading to huge dependencies, vendor lock ins, monopolies, price gauging

Have you analyzed how many dependencies are in your self hosted projects? What happens to them if maintainers retire? How long did it take your self hosted projects to resolve the 10/10 CVE in NextJS? And as for price gouging, if it’s cheaper than an engineer to properly support a self-hosted solution, I’ll still make that trade as even $80K for software is cheaper than $120K to support it. If you’re at the scale where you don’t have a proper engineer to manage it, do not self host. Business downtime is always more expensive than software (in this case, 5 salaries for 2 weeks to do absolutely nothing + lost donations + reputational damage + customer damages, because “self hosting is easy and cheaper”).

If you need 73 plugins for wordpress, then Wordpress is a poor technology choice for your usecase.

disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong, especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut them out.

If they don't have the resources to switch to a different hosting provider, why do you assume they will have the resources to fix things when their self-host solution shits the bed?

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Switching the ecosystem from something like Shopify to some other shop software requires a lot of manual work, and some of the stuff won't even be transferable 1:1.

Fixing some issue with your WordPress installation will require a person who can google and knows a little stuff about webservers, and maybe containers, and will usually go pretty fast, as WordPress is open source and runs almost half the internet, and almost every problem that will come up will have been solved in some StackOverflow thread or GitHub issue.

Usually though, if you run WordPress and you're not doing a lot of hacky stuff, you will not encounter problems. Vendors shutting you down, increasing their pricing, or shutting down vital features in their software, happens regularly though. And if it happens, shit hits the fan.

Of course it’s sometimes the wrong choice. Not everyone should self-host their own DNS and other things if their needs are already meet.