Those who know me personally or have worked with me professionally know I am very opinionated when it comes to tech, and I don’t sugarcoat it. So, it may come as a surprise when I launched this site, which is running in wordpress.com. Before you go bashing me for being a hypocrite, let me tell you my story about PHP, and why I made the shocking choice.
I have been programming since I was 14 years old. I started with BASIC. By 16 I was doing assembly (and it made me ask why the fuck I was torturing myself). At the age of 23, I joined a marketing company with a loyalty platform as its flagship product. It was my first official job in the IT industry, as a PHP developer.
Yes folks, I was a PHP developer.
In the one year I worked with PHP, I understood why many people love it and stick to it. It just works. You just need to have a good grasp of the flow, and it was “dead simple” to translate that into a working site. But in reality, it is far from simple. And it will only make you closer to becoming brain dead.
I will not delve into my hatred for PHP any further, as this topic has been beaten to death and beyond.
So, I hate PHP. I do not trust systems built on PHP. I have rescued numerous compromised PHP-based systems (including sites built on WordPress). But why am I trusting a site built on PHP, let alone WordPress? I am simply scaling my life.
Building a website isn’t easy, especially if it is exposed to the public. Over the past 10 years, the number of things to consider to ensure that a site is working and secure has exploded. At a high level, these are the things you need to consider:
- PHP Configuration and Tuning
- Web server tuning
- Database tuning
- Network topology
- Security
- Caching
…And the list goes on.
Now, I could have done all of this myself. After all, I have the working experience to deal with WordPress. Or better, I could revive my old blogging app. But I didn’t.
You see, the most valuable resource that we have is time. I could either invest time to build my new site (which is totally doable even with my crazy schedule), or go with an established platform, and have more time for my family. At this point in my life, I went with the latter.
From a tech perspective, I am not a PHP guy (despite my background). I don’t even want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. And most of my time will be devoted to security work, which is a never-ending race. I would rather let the real experts in the platform deal with this than me.
From a business perspective, how much is your time? I could get a VPS from Digital Ocean at $10/month, spend 40 hours for the initial build of the site, and another 20 hours for security before I write my first post. That, or pay a subscription to wordpress.com for roughly the same price, spend the first 20 hours for the initial setup, and then start publishing.
At the end of the day it all boils down to what brings value to you. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and I have used both in various situations. For this site, I chose to swallow my pride and value my time, rather than be the perfectionist tech guy who spends hundreds of hours tweaking.
John Paul Alcala 