Why You're Safer With a Hosted Service

Robert Scoble recently blogged about how he no longer feels safe with WordPress, after hackers broke into his site, deleted archives for which he had no backups, and added a lot of spam content.

This is a painful situation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And it is all too common.

WordPress isn’t really to blame here. Security exploits come up all the time, so if you’re managing your own software, you’d better keep up to date with the security patches. And if you’re writing your own back-end code, you’re on your own — writing secure back-end code is an ongoing challenge.

It’s also common for backups to not happen as reliably as we’d all like. It’s human nature to ignore things when there’s no apparent problem.

These are some of the reasons why I believe a hosted content management system is the way to go for most sites. The hosted CMS provider (such as Webvanta) can leverage its software development and operations across hundreds or thousands of web sites. They’re likely to have a lot more discipline about things like backups and security patches than any individual site owner.

It’s a matter of what business you’re in. If you’re in the content business, you don’t want to be in the software development and server operations business unless you absolutely have to.