"The Natural Philosopher"  wrote

| On 16/08/2020 21:04, Poprocks wrote:
| > There's no point in utilizing a system like WordPress to generate pages
| > dynamically, if those pages themselves are actually static.  It's just a
| > waste of much-needed server resources.
|
| There may be, if those pages can thereby be indexed and centrally backed
| up and generally subjected to all the cool stuff  databases make possible.
| How much overhead is it to read a text file out of a database as against
| out of a native file system?
|

  That's what companies like Wix are doing. Wordpress
seems to be similar if you use them as host. With Wix it's
even more extreme. The website URL, such as acme.com,
is redirected to the Wix server. The page is little more
than a JSON list. There isn't actually any server at acme.com.

  It's a way to provide fast, efficient and easy website
creation through WYSIWYG tools online, with the website
owner being able to completely ignore the technical details.
It's also a design that allows Wix to set up what might
be called web design scam #1: Get the customer to sign on
to hosting service so that they'll have to pay a monthly
subscription and you can hold their website files hostage.

  There may also be advantages in terms of selling visitor
data, putting in ads, etc. Since I don't allow script I can
see little or nothing of Wix-hosted websites, so I don't
know how adulterated they might be. But I do know that
a lot of small businesses are using Wix.

  I'd guess that most changeable corporate sites are also
using backend databases. Something like a newspaper
changes content frequently. The number of pages is vast.
And probably all of them are already using backend code,
anyway. A truly static webpage is rare these days. I set
my browser cache limit at 10 MB because virtually every
page I visit registers as a new page. Nothing's ever coming
out of the cache because there's never a 304 server code
returned!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05