Moving away from ManageWP

Yesterday, ManageWP announced that they have been purchased by GoDaddy.  A day after the announcements, there were 338 comments, and 80% of them were negative towards the purchase.  Comments starting off like this: “My heart sank”, “This is somewhat disappointing”, “Not cool”, “Well that sucks”, and “I cancelled my account immediately upon reading this news.”

I can’t blame the company.  Why not?  Build a great product, sell it to one of the biggest hosting companies in the world?!?  Sounds like a win for the company, but a loss for the clients.  GoDaddy has a horrible reputation for hosting.  In fact, I have fixed quite a few hacked sites on GoDaddy, and actual have switched clients from GoDaddy to WP Engine.

Whether you like it or not, if you are moving from ManageWP or not, I figured I would let people know about a few options.

1. MainWP – This is actual what Sideways8 uses to update sites.  Now, since we host on WP Engine, the backups are done on WP Engine’s system, but the plugin and WordPress updates are done through MainWP… and it is free.  They have a paid module system, so if you need to back to Amazon’s S3, then you purchase that module.  It is a great system because it actually runs as a parent-child plugin relationship.  You install MainWP on a site, and then each child site, you install MainWP Child plugin.  It is very simple to setup.
2. InfiniteWP – This is what we used to use.  I know a lot of people use it, but I don’t like the fact that it runs “outside of WordPress”, meaning, the main parent program doesn’t actually run within WordPress.
3. WPRemote – This is a 3rd option I know very little about.  I tried this two years ago and it seemed to have work, but for some reason, I landed on using InfiniteWP.  It is a managed service and it only requires a plugin to be installed on the sites.

Just remember, there isn’t a need to move away from ManageWP, but if you are looking to do so, these are some options.  Enjoy!