For every developer building websites for small to medium sized businesses, there’s the classic dilemma of hosting:

• Should I refer the client to a hosting company?
• Should I help them out with hosting but potentially leave them stranded once the project is done?
• Should I have my own hosting solution, providing some maintenance (for a fee) but risking calls at 2 AM when the server is offline?
  (not to mention the potential identity crisis: “Am I a developer, or a system administrator?”)

I’d like to write about option number 3, since it’s the most interesting one for developers. Whatever you don’t want to manually manage - you automate.

Situation: You have 10 WordPress websites, and there’s a recent crucial security update that came out, how do you update all these websites without taking away 30-40 minutes of your time?

Situation 2: Someone hacked 3 of your WordPress blogs, injecting all your posts with some iframe directing to a malicious website, do you have a backup of your client’s latest articles?

In comes WP Remote

WP Remote is a Free WP plugin that lets you connect your websites to a single control panel (visible on WP Remote’s website itself).

On a single panel, you’re able to update WordPress’ Core, Plugins & Themes,
as well as Backing up your entire website + database.

Here’s a screenshot with an example website:

As you can see, it’s all pretty tidy and very clear, here how the backup tab looks like:

The beautiful thing about WP Remote is that it doesn’t ask you for your User/Password, instead, it uses a unique API Key to contact your website’s local plugin, which is definitely more secure.

Gone are the days of going from one Admin Panel to the other, doing the same task over and over again until you get carpal tunnel syndrome (can you get that from mouse clicks too?)

Next week I’m going to try to help those who need a little more automation in their WP lives.

With a great tool called WP CLI.

(WP - WordPress, for those who don’t know)