Simply Static Studio has been in active development for about six months now, and we still haven’t launched the early access program.
If you have followed the rapid development of Simply Static (and Pro) over the last couple of years, you’ll notice that we tend to ship new features pretty rapidly.
Given that our team includes two senior-level developers with more than a decade of experience in software engineering in the WordPress space and a former background in system administration, you would expect a tiny hosting business to be done in no time, right?
Just let AI handle the parts, quickly review them, and push them to production. Well, no.
Making things easy is hard.
My vision for Simply Static Studio followed a single core principle: make complex things easy.
Making things easy in the hosting space is tricky because you can’t use 99% of the available tools.
There are certainly tools out there that can simplify things a lot (WCMS, Plesk, etc.), but they are ugly and introduce unnecessary overhead that I don’t want our users to be confronted with.
Custom Dashboard
Early on, I decided we were going to build our own custom dashboard powered by React and Supabase.
While this drastically increases the workload, it offers enough flexibility to build a truly unique experience for our users limited to relevant features.
First Site Experience
We’ve spent hundreds of hours nailing the first site experience.
Clicking on “Create Site” in Studio not only spins up a new WordPress website, it:
- Creates DNS records for WP and the CDN
- It setups an NGINX web server and applies our highly secure configuration
- It setups the CDN and applies a variety of rules to ensure the best performance
- It issues SSL certificates for both WP and the static site
- It installs WP CLI and configures a server-side cron job that runs every minute
- It installs WordPress, Ollie, and WPForms and configures them
- It installs Simply Static and Simply Static Pro, configures them, and activates the license
- It runs the static site export based on our optimized configuration
Don’t even get me started on all the extra steps when you use our automated migration (Uploading/Downloading/Replacing URLs/Merging directories..)
Powerful Tools
Having an easy-to-use hosting platform is one thing, but extending it with powerful but simple-to-use tools was equally important to me.
Magic Link Login
Easy Team Management
Connecting Domains
Handling Forms
It took an immense amount of time to get everything right.
Every feature needed to be radically simplified and secure. I can’t remember how many iterations we went through to make the magic login secure and UX-friendly (just to give you an example).
Automation
Running a hosting business is a lot about automation.
Despite our efforts to build a nice UI and make things easier for our users, we had to ensure the systems we put in place were scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain and debug.
People expect certain things when deciding where to host their website, and we don’t want to fall behind:
Automated Backups
We fully automated backups for our users. They are stored in a remote location on an entirely separate provider.
This ensures we can access everything even if a server suffers from an outage or things go wrong.
Automated SSL
We fully automated SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt (including renewals). It was a learning experience, and I learned my lessons about API limits when using the service.
Automated Billing
I know that’s boring, but that’s also part of running a hosting business.
We had to automate the entire customer journey, from signing up for the trial to upgrading or downgrading your plan and what happens when a subscription is canceled or expires.
Automated Provising
I briefly touched on that when talking about the first site experience, but we also had to develop a technical solution to automate provisioning new sites in a scalable way fully.
This is not an article about technical details, but I can confidently say that we’ve learned a lot about Kubernetes, Helm, and server monitoring.
All these things take time and have a steep learning curve, and I can also confirm that AI isn’t that helpful when it comes to solving complex network issues and setups (I tried! 😅)
Human Touch
Let me clarify one thing first: There is NO AI support in Simply Static Studio.
I’m tired of AI chatbots and all those silly AI features that get brute-forced into hosting dashboards to make “websites with zero effort”.
While we certainly use some AI technology to make things easier for ourselves (especially for monitoring, alerts, and resource optimization), the moment you open the chat box, you talk to a human:
Depending on your timezone, you may chat with Scott (US), Igor (Europe), or Patrick (currently Asia😅), so come by and say “Hi!”
Legal Stuff
Running a business from Germany (or from almost anywhere in Europe, really) requires considerable legal preparation.
I’ve spent a decent amount of time getting our lawyer to create and optimize our terms of service, data privacy compliance, and ensuring we fully comply with GPDR and CCPA.
This also involved reaching out to all our partners, be it an API-only integration or an official partnership. We needed a way to track down all the dependencies involved, get custom agreements for storing user data, and ensure that our users feel safe and their privacy can be assured at all times.
This also means reviewing and signing countless DPAs (Data Processing Agreements) – it’s not the most fun part of building a business, but it’s essential.
We will improve that even further by getting official certificates like ISO 27001, but the fees are steep for a bootstrapped company.
