Announcing Simply Static Studio

We are soon going into early access for our new product: Simply Static Studio.
Before we get into the features, let’s do a quick recap of our history:

A Brief History of Simply Static

The release of Simply Static

Simply Static started as a free plugin in late 2015. Yes, it has been ten years of Static WordPress with our plugin now.

While it solved the purpose of making WordPress static and saving it for archival reasons (the primary purpose back in the day), the tech landscape changed dramatically during this period.

Jekyll and other static site generators were released and established as a lean, fast, and maintenance-free alternative to popular CMS solutions like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

The hype made publishing and hosting a static site more effortless than ever. Netlify, GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, Amazon AWS S3, Digital Ocean Static Sites, Vercel, you name it. You can host your static site anywhere and often for a low yearly fee.

The release of Simply Static Pro

Given all these market changes and my curiosity about server technology, I set the scope for what became Simply Static Pro in early 2023. We are celebrating two years with our pro add-on soon!

We pushed the boundaries of what Static WordPress can do with various deployment options, support for search, forms, comments, optimization features, and more.

Where we are today

We still suffer from hosting providers’ ignorance and technical inability to adapt their configuration slightly to give our customers the best possible experience.

If everyone could experience Simply Static as I do (we have managed our own servers for about 10 years now), It would have grown even more. We could make the concept of Static WordPress available to an even bigger audience.

Announcing Simply Static Studio

After months of development and the conception of a managed platform, we’ve found the perfect compromise: offering a hosted solution while allowing people to move to their own hosting solution without a massive lock-in effect.

Create Sites

The dashboard is your central hub for creating and managing your Static WordPress websites.
It’s as easy as clicking “Create Site”, typing a name, and we handle it from there:

Magic Login Links

Our WordPress websites are protected via Basic Auth and with our own firewall implementation, which means it’s hard to access it by just typing the randomly generated URL – to solve that, we implemented a one-click solution that takes you directly into the dashboard:

Easy Custom Domains

We know how important it is to have your own domain associated with your website, and we wanted to make the process as straightforward as possible.

If you want to start with your own domain right away, go for it. We’ve also got you covered if you need a temporary domain for testing.

Team Management

Working together is key for most WordPress projects, and sharing passwords is not only a bad practice but a security risk.

We made it super easy to invite your freelancer and agency to your project and let them use the magic login link and deal with DNS settings and the best thing? Their account is free.

Form Submissions

People don’t want to use a third-party service to handle form submissions. That’s why we handle it for you.

Once a form is submitted to your website, we store it inside your protected WordPress installation. There are no monthly limits – unlimited submissions for everyone.

Simply Static Pro is included

Simply Static Pro is automatically included in all sites created with Studio.

Our static site hosting solution offers the easiest path for beginners. Still, you can leverage everything we’ve built over the years by switching to another platform—we’ll keep managing WordPress for you.

Early Access

We are now preparing for early access and opened up the waitlist for you to join.

The rules are simple: It’s free and limited to one website per account. No credit card is required, just your name and e-mail address.

The server stack

This is optional, but if you are curious about the tech stack that powers Simply Static Studio, continue reading:

NGINX on LTS Ubuntu

We chose an NGINX-only server stack running on the latest LTS of Ubuntu.

This allows us to handle most of the security-related features on the server level without slowing down your WordPress websites (firewall, CORS restrictions, file-based caching..)

It’s also the stack we are the most familiar with – it just feels right to choose a web server where you can control everything in-house without any external advisors needed.

Isolation

Each WordPress website runs in a fully isolated environment and does not need to share resources with other websites (no shared hosting).

Each WordPress website also runs on its own web server instance, so we can adjust the configuration based on your needs.
Do you need IP-based restrictions to secure your website further? Would a custom cron job for a specific task be possible? YES.

Backups & SSL

We automate SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt and handle the renewal for you, so you need not worry.
We also entirely automate backups and store them on separate remote storage.

Need to roll back? We do it for you, no need to mess with other plugins to do it.
We create weekly backups and store them for 30 days (we also offer daily/hourly backups and longer retention periods).

SFTP/SSH

By default, all websites created on Studio are locked down. We only allow SFTP/SSH access via your public SSH key.
Please send it to us via the chatbox in your dashboard, and we whitelist you.

All servers come with WP-CLI pre-installed and configured. We also have a pretty great WP CLI integration in Simply Static Pro.

CDN

Your static site is hosted on our CDN. With over 120 PoPs and a 25ms global latency, you won’t have to look for another provider to host it. It’s also not just about fast hosting but flexibility.

We are in complete control of the stack, so if you need something extra-ordinary (e.g., a proxy setup), we can help, but our default configuration is pretty solid already.

Release

We haven’t set a release date yet, but early access will start at the end of February 2025.
We want to build this platform together with the people who brought us here and will carefully listen to every feedback.

We want to make it right from the beginning.
There are already enough half-assed AI-generated MVPs that don’t work, and we won’t be one of them.

Thanks for taking the time to read that post,
Patrick (the founder of Simply Static)