All posts filed under: Hosting

Automattic’s trademarks post vs other ‘WordPress hosting’ providers

Published by Richard Best

Introduction On 3 October 2024, an Associate General Counsel at Automattic published a useful post on “WordPress Trademarks: A Legal Perspective”. The post is useful for a few reasons, including because it acknowledges, I believe for the first time during the current controversy, the role of nominative fair use. And so, in that sense, it contributes to the community’s understanding of Automattic’s take on the trademark issues. I have been saying for a while now that nominative fair use would likely be a central issue in any trademark litigation between Automattic and WP Engine. WP Engine’s court filing confirms that. Why I have written this post I have written this post because Automattic’s positions on: trademark infringement in its cease and desist letter to WP Engine; and nominative fair use in the post referred to above, are potentially significant for large numbers of other WordPress hosting providers (excluding WordPress.com). As a long-time user of WordPress, it concerns me that such an important topic is not being more openly discussed by other lawyers, particularly US trademark …

Thoughts on the attack on WP Engine

Published by Richard Best

Downward criticism of community members The WordPress community is no stranger to one of the project’s founders criticising those he considers to be behaving egregiously. Those of us who have been using WordPress for a long time will recall the strong and sometimes prolonged criticism of the likes of Chris Pearson, Envato, GoDaddy, and others. But arguably they all pale in comparison to the attack on WP Engine at the most recent WordCamp in Portland, Oregon (made all the more bizarre by the fact that WP Engine was sponsoring the event and had numerous staff attending). In days gone by, most criticisms arose from perceived violations of the GPL or other open source licensing arrangements. In many cases, the criticisms were understandable. If you use WordPress and violate the GPL (by, for example, not licensing modifications appropriately when you distribute them), then you shouldn’t be surprised if someone complains, even loudly. The attack on WP Engine The attack on WP Engine was of a completely different ilk. After explaining the ‘tragedy of the commons’, Matt …

Beware of shared hosting and the storage of backups

Published by Richard Best

Backups of your WordPress site or at least your database are essential right? Yes, absolutely, but sometimes you need to be careful where you put them, as I seek to show in this true story. A good number of years ago I assumed responsibility for a non-profit, private sector organisation’s WordPress site and, because money was an issue, a well-known shared hosting provider was used to host the site.  We were mindful of the importance of backup so installed iThemes’ excellent BackupBuddy plugin. Periodically we made full site backups with the plugin. The backups were saved to a backups folder within our WordPress installation on the shared hosting server as well as to a local computer. Some time later I received an unexpected email from the hosting provider which said, among other things: “Your web hosting account for [website url] has been deactivated, as of [a specified date]. (reason: Backups/Storage Constraints) This deactivation was due to a Terms of Service violation associated with your account. At sign-up, all users state that they have read through, …