There are the many reasons for Whipping up a WordPress Website. Because a free, full-service website can can meet immediate needs:
1 -Temporary testing site for trying out WordPress themes, plugins, styling and apps. Stay upwith new WordPress trends an technology by trying out the tools on a real temporary WordPress site;
2 -Staging site for safely testing major website changes before moving them to the production site;
3 – Instead of taking down your site into Full Maintenance mode; keep the viable portions of the site up and running while doing the testing and repairs on separate staging site. But the trick is choosing the right staging site depending on need for online integrations/connections or sizeof testing data;
Now Whipping-up a WordPress Website implies some preferred characteristics for such a website.
> Whipping-up implies fast and easy setup of the temporary WP website;
> The resulting website should also be fast allowing admin operations and actual testing to run quickly;
> Low cost per staging/temporary website;
> There should be no limits on the WordPress website using BuddyPress, multi-user and any legitimate WordPress theme, plugin and app;
> Simple URL domain naming;
> Security, backup, and support/help services associated with a good WordPress tool.
Now this developer relied first on extra websites on a shared hosting service like SiteGround and then moved to Boldgrid in 2018 when BoldGrid provided 10 WordPress website instances for $35US/year. Yes, the URL to an instance WordPress website is a strange amalgam which is not customizable – like so https://demo2.cloudwp.dev/trial-45ut457u/. Also, there is no email service except through WordPress SMTP plugins. But BoldGrid provided backup[Total Upkeep], SEO Services[Boldgrid Easy SEO], PageBuilder [Post and Page Builder]and a Performance Tuning coach. So intially BoldGrid met our need for quick, temporary WordPress workspace minus user set domain name, only second tier email service and no WPMU support. In sum, a working combo of temporary WordPress site services.
Boldgrid in 2018 delivered fast and easy setup, reasonable admin and runtime speed. In addition with Snaps theme and plugin templates, one could accelerate the temp site creeation. But by Spring 2022 BoldGrid – Cloud WordPress Goes Awry had serious response problems because it put no limit on what users could run on their Boldgrid instances. So there has been an invasion of cryptominers, gamers and hackers whose compute-intensive operations effectively reduced BoldGrid response time to a slow crawl. Instances Not Available became a plague including during BoldGrid Website Builder operations. In short, time to look for a better Temporary WordPress website services.
Finding a good Whipping-up a Temporary WordPress Site Tool
This was the problem posed at a Toronto WordPress Solutions meetup group.After an impromptu discussion, our group brainstormed 5 possible solutions. One popular method that was rejected right away was a LocalHost installation like Laragon,XAMPP, or Bitnami for 3 critical reasons
– 1)making localhost sites available on the Internet with a simple, unattended Web Url link is very hard hard to do. Yes, making the localhost link through Zoom, Hangup, Facetime or special livelink connection/session works, but it takes two to tango not like the more useful, unattended web link;
– 2)but even if you are able to view a localhost site thru Zoom or other livelink, it is still not possible to do a speed test of the site using GTMetrix or Pingdom. This is a big drawback;
– 3)each of the localhost test environs had some limits on what integrations or external network interconnections to other sites could be made.
Yes, most of the localhost tools allowed users to control what versions of PHP, MySQL [or other databases], JavaScript, versions, CSS scripts and other apps could be used. A few localhost tools allowed choice of Server Engine among Apache, NGinx, LiteSpeed being the most used options. Also the new WordPress site creation time was similar to common online experience- 2 to 5 minutes. In contrast, Boldgrid and InstaWP could spin up a WordPress Website with user supplied theme and plugin list in 5-50 seconds as shown below.
But even more important BoldGrid has apparently cleared out the exploiter websites using BoldGrid for intense computaional tasks. But how BoldGrid did this and would they be able to maintain good response and uptime for clients is still a valid question .
So after careful discussion, here is our list of temporary WordPress website creation tools:
1 –Instawp delivers 5 free and fast websites that last for a week. The pro version 15 sites with 5GB storage, plus removal of the 7day site expiry limit for $90US/year;
2 -Tastewp.com also delivers 6 free fast 1GB WordPress websites . The Pro version for $3US /month preserves the WordPress website which now can grow to 20GB in size with your chosen domain name plus added services;
3 –BoldGrid delivers 10 online WordPresssites for $$35US/year or 20 sites for $60US/year; there is no size limit to the websites but the domain name is assigned by BoldGrid
4 –Siteground shared hosting offers backup, staging, email, multiple domains for $60US/year for 1st year on shared hosting. But the price after the first year jumps substantially;
5 –Cloudways offers your choice of Cloud hosting from five vendors for $144US/year for Linode 1GB Ram 25GB disk. But there are plugin restrictions and substantial setup time;
6 – Flywheel managed WordPress hosting for $1150US/year for 10 sites with 20GB storage & 200GB bandwidth
However, this list was quickly pared down to InstaWP and BoldGrid given their easy and fast test website setup with full security, migration, and backup services. Also the cost savings of both InstaWP and BoldGrid are substantially better than all the other tools. The only gap in the two systems is lack of support for WordPress Multi-user plus domain naming and email ease in which case look to the other three WordPress service providers. Qsandbox.com was a potential competitor – check out its features here
Substantially Similar Quick Hosting Services
If you look at the setup and control dashboards for BoldGrid and InstaWP the underlying services are the same.
The interfaces dashboards are different but the features they offer are broadly similar as seen in the table below.
[table id=3 / responsive=scroll]
InstaWP emphasizes special deployment and integration features many of which are still to appear while BoldGrid with its suite of plugins and theme templates offers broad WordPress development features. However, InstaWP offers clear mechnisms to control exploitation with total GB limits to the sum of active and expired instances, 7 day expiry of instances, 10 restores of expired sites, etc. Will this be enough to protect overall InstaWP response time or will InstaWP have to invoke more upper usage limits? In contrast, BoldGrid has not announced any public usage limits; but must be exercising some controls as response and uptime have improved markedly from Spring 2022.
So currently Boldgrid and InstaWP for a year will undergo further use and testing. Likely – a more detailed InstaWP review as soon as the documentation improves. It is barebones in substantial parts; so where did the Automattic money go?
If this review has been helpful, buy me a cup of coffee or attend one of our info-packed WP Solutions meetups.