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Blaine Hatab
Blaine Hatab

Reputation: 1676

Rails server that can compete with wordpress

So I have a lot of smaller clients that want more simple websites. This is very common and even more common is the mess of code that I get from their last developer who used wordpress. Since I am trying to hone my rails skills, I would prefer to just redo the site in rails. The biggest problem I've encountered though is server hosting costs.

It is really hard to convince someone to go from their $5-10 a month cost for their servers to $34 with something like heroku or amazon EC2. So my question is how can I effectively use rails to rebuild these wordpress sites without incurring more costs on the client?

Some options I have thought of are:

Some of the example sites are a store, blog/store, and a marketing website.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 107

Answers (2)

Nathan Dawson
Nathan Dawson

Reputation: 19308

There's nothing wrong with honing your skills on the job but you also have to be considerate of the clients needs.

Just because you'd prefer to redo the site in rails doesn't mean that's the best thing for the client. If their site is running smoothly on their cheap hosting do they really want to increase their monthly outgoings to support a platform that they didn't want in the first place.

There's very little functionality the client might need that they can't get from WordPress and the examples you gave certainly don't suggest rails is necessary.

I'd suggest keeping them on WordPress and seeking clients who need a rails developer.

Upvotes: 3

nickcoxdotme
nickcoxdotme

Reputation: 6697

Here's my 2 cents. Stick with WordPress. If you're trying to hone your Rails skills, start a side project. But if you try to convert these sites to Rails, you're going to be incurring a lot of cost to the client (your time), and hosting. As you mentioned, hosting a Rails app costs much more.

It's hard to justify that cost just to hone your skills unless you could convince the client that, in the long term, they will save a great deal of money, either by the reduced overhead on code maintenance, or they're trying to do something that Rails can do that WordPress genuinely can't. With the ubiquity of high quality WordPress plugins, you'd really have to dig for a functionality that you absolutely cannot do with WordPress that you can with Rails, though there are some.

Sure, Rails is much more pleasurable to work in than WordPress, but if these sites are for clients, you can't just factor in developer happiness. You need to be adding value for your customer, and building a site in Rails because it's more fun to work in adds little value for your customer.

Honestly, if they're a few static sites, then keep them on WordPress. You could start new clients out on a Rails-based CMS (or a custom solution, if you can sell them on it and you're sure you can make it worth their money), but my advice would be that it's not worth the cost to you or to them to build the sites in Rails just for the sake of building the sites in Rails.

Upvotes: 2

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