Open Source Guarantees Longevity That No Proprietary Platform Can
Let me walk you through a graveyard.
Not a metaphorical one — an actual list of website platforms that real businesses built on, in good faith, that no longer exist or no longer resemble what they were when those businesses signed up.
GeoCities. Remember it? Yahoo acquired it in 1999 for over three billion dollars. By 2009, it was shut down. Millions of sites deleted.
Google Sites (Classic). Launched 2008. Discontinued 2021. Google gave a year’s warning and then turned it off. Businesses that had embedded Google Sites into their workflows had to rebuild somewhere else.
Adobe Muse. The platform built specifically for designers who didn’t want to code. Launched 2012. Discontinued 2018. Six months’ notice. If your design work for clients lived on Muse, you had half a year to figure out what to do next.
Apple’s iWeb and MobileMe. Discontinued 2012. Sites hosted on MobileMe were deleted. Not migrated. Deleted.
Yahoo SiteBuilder. Gone, as part of Yahoo’s long platform consolidation.
Weebly. Acquired by Square in 2018. Technically still alive, but effectively on life support — the product development stalled post-acquisition and has never recovered. Long-term Weebly users know it’s borrowed time.
And then there are the platforms that didn’t shut down but changed so dramatically, or repriced so aggressively, that the change forced businesses to make decisions they hadn’t anticipated making. Squarespace has revised its pricing structure three times since 2014 — each time increasing costs for existing customers. Wix moved from a feature-based tiering model to a business-tier model that pushed legacy users onto more expensive plans. Neither of those is a catastrophic event. But they’re both examples of a fundamental truth about proprietary platforms: the terms you signed up on are not the terms you’ll be operating on in five years. And you have no vote in that decision.
That’s the platform graveyard. Real platforms, real dates, real businesses displaced.
Now tell me: where are you building your website?
The Question Nobody Asks at the Start
When a business buys a domain name, they often register it for ten years. That’s a signal about intent — you’re not running an experiment, you’re building a long-term presence. You’re committing to an address.
When a business signs up for managed hosting, the implicit assumption is similar: this is infrastructure, not a trial. Infrastructure needs to be stable across years, not quarters.
And yet, the platform decision — the software the website actually runs on — is often made based on what looks best in a demo today. What’s easiest to set up this week. What a friend recommended. What came up first in a Google search for “best website builder.”
Nobody asks: Will this platform still exist, in recognisable form, in ten years? Will its pricing still be viable? Will the company that owns it still have the same incentives? Will the ecosystem of developers, plugins, and integrations that exists today still be there when I need it?
These are infrastructure questions. They belong alongside questions about domain registration and hosting reliability. They almost never get asked.
After twenty-plus years working with hundreds of websites — building them, hosting them, fixing them, migrating them — I’ve become deeply sceptical of any platform decision that doesn’t account for longevity. Not because new platforms are bad. Some of them are genuinely well-built. But because the economics of commercial platforms and the interests of the businesses that rely on them are not the same, and that gap only matters when it’s too late.
What Open Source Actually Means for Your Business
WordPress has been in continuous active development since May 2003. That’s twenty-three years as of 2026. It’s released under the GPL v2 license, which means the code cannot be withdrawn from the public. It cannot be bought and shut down in a way that makes existing installations stop working. It cannot be repriced, because the software itself costs nothing. The hosting costs money. The plugins cost money. The developer time costs money. The software that runs everything else: free, forever, by legal design.
This isn’t just a nice philosophical point. It has practical consequences.
When WordPress makes a major architectural change — and they have, with the block editor and Full Site Editing — existing sites don’t break. The upgrade path is managed with multi-year deprecation windows. The classic editor remained a supported option for years. The migration tools were built before the old approach was removed. That’s what a twenty-three-year-old project governed by a foundation and hundreds of independent contributors looks like: changes happen slowly, deliberately, with backwards compatibility as a design constraint.
Compare that to Adobe Muse. Six months’ notice and then gone. Or Google Sites, which gave a year. Or any number of platforms where the deprecation window was defined by the company’s financial decision, not by the users’ readiness.
The difference isn’t that open source is better software. Squarespace may have a cleaner interface. Wix may get a small business online faster. For some use cases, that convenience is real. The difference is what happens when the company behind the platform changes direction.
WordPress has commercial gravity around it too. Automattic matters. WordPress.com matters. Matt Mullenweg matters. They can make product decisions, business decisions, governance decisions, and unpopular decisions. But they cannot take WordPress with them.
That is the point of the GPL. If a company changes direction, the code does not disappear into the company. The community can keep using it, maintaining it, and, if necessary, walking away with it. Joomla exists because the Mambo community split from the commercial owner behind Mambo in 2005 and continued the project under a new name. The software, the skills, and the community did not vanish because one organisation made a decision contributors could not accept.
That is the insurance policy open source gives a business. Not perfection. Not freedom from politics. Not tidy governance. Just this: the platform your business is built on cannot be taken away by one boardroom, one acquisition, or one commercial pivot.
The Evidence From the Ground
I see this play out in real terms.
A tiny homes business in New Zealand moved its WordPress site to Wix in late 2025. The site was gone in a single email — the client informed us, the invoice item was removed. There was no drama about it. But here’s what didn’t happen: nobody asked whether their SEO history transferred cleanly. Nobody evaluated what Wix’s pricing model looks like in three years. Nobody asked what happens if Wix makes the same kind of pricing change that pushed legacy users onto more expensive plans — which they already did once. The business made a decision on day one cost. The long-term exposure was invisible.
A digital agency managing multiple client sites had a problem: one client’s designer had built their site on Squarespace. The project coordinator asked whether this was an issue. The honest answer was: it’s not immediately a problem, but it’s not going to get resolved while it stays on Squarespace. The site sat there not because Squarespace was better for that use case, but because migrating it cost money the client hadn’t budgeted. That’s how proprietary platforms persist: not through excellence, but through migration cost as a trap. The client had zero influence over Squarespace’s roadmap or pricing. They were paying rent on borrowed infrastructure.
And then there’s the pattern I see in my own customer base that makes the strongest argument: the businesses that have been on managed WordPress hosting the longest have never needed to rebuild their foundation. An Australian media consultancy has been on the same WordPress infrastructure since 2018 — eight years, through server migrations, security incidents, platform updates, and multiple phases of their own business growth. A New Zealand SaaS business has been running on managed WordPress since March of 2018. Seven years of continuous operation. Neither of those businesses has ever had a conversation with me that started: “We need to rebuild everything because WordPress changed what it is.”
That conversation doesn’t happen. It can’t happen, because the GPL license makes it structurally impossible.
The Counter-Argument: Isn’t Automattic the Same Risk?
This is the intelligent counter-argument, and it deserves a straight answer.
WordPress.com is owned by Automattic. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s founder, has significant influence over the project’s direction. The WP.org / WP.com split that became public in 2024 raised legitimate questions about governance. Isn’t that a single point of failure?
Here’s the distinction: Automattic owns WordPress.com, the hosted platform. They employ many of the core WordPress developers. They have enormous influence over the project’s direction.
But they don’t own the software. The GPL license means that if Automattic were acquired tomorrow, or if Matt Mullenweg stepped back, or if a major governance conflict split the project, the WordPress codebase you’re running on your server doesn’t change. It doesn’t stop working. The thousands of WordPress developers worldwide don’t suddenly lose their skills. The plugin ecosystem doesn’t evaporate.
Open source doesn’t depend on any single actor’s continued participation. That’s the design. Drupal lost Dries Buytaert’s full-time attention years ago — it’s still running. The Apache HTTP Server project has had dozens of major contributors come and go over thirty years. The Linux kernel has survived the departure of more core contributors than most proprietary platforms have ever had.
The strongest analogy I can offer is this: choosing WordPress is less like choosing a software company, and more like choosing electricity. The infrastructure behind it is maintained by a distributed system of contributors, standards bodies, and economic incentives so broad that no single failure point can turn it off.
Automattic can change WordPress.com. They cannot change the GPL. They cannot reach into your server and modify your installation. They cannot reprice the software that’s already running.
Choosing Your Platform Like You Choose Your Accountant
Here’s the frame I use when I talk to a business owner who’s weighing platform options.
You don’t choose an accountant for the next tax season. You choose an accountant for the next ten years — someone who’ll understand your business, who’ll be there when the IRD sends a letter, who knows the history when things get complicated. The cost of switching accountants isn’t just the search and the onboarding. It’s the loss of institutional knowledge, the re-explaining of context, the risk that the new person misses something the old person would have caught.
Platform choice works the same way. You’re not choosing a website for the next three months. You’re choosing the foundation your digital presence will run on for the next decade. The question isn’t what’s easiest to set up today. The question is what will still be here, still be supported, still have a thriving ecosystem of developers and integrations, when your business needs to make changes in five years that you can’t predict today.
When I measure proprietary platforms against that question, the historical record is damning. Of the twenty most popular website builders in 2010, fewer than half remain as independent platforms today. The rest were acquired and run down, shut down, repriced dramatically, or pivoted into unrecognisable products. Not because those companies were incompetent — because the economics of commercial software create pressures that community-governed open source simply doesn’t have.
The businesses that have been running the longest on managed WordPress infrastructure are not running WordPress because they evaluated it exhaustively in 2010 and concluded it was optimal. They’re running it because they made a decision that has never needed to be revisited. The platform hasn’t forced their hand. That’s longevity. That’s the point.
The Companion Argument
Last week’s article made the case for WordPress as the lingua franca of the web — the common language of SEO specialists, copywriters, developers, and virtual assistants. If you haven’t read it, the core argument is this: choosing WordPress is choosing a labour market. The deepest, widest labour market in the web industry.
That argument is about talent availability today. This argument is about strategic risk tomorrow.
They belong together because they’re both consequences of the same structural fact: WordPress is open source, governed by a community, licensed under the GPL, and has been in continuous development for twenty-three years. The talent pool is large because the platform has been around long enough for the industry to learn it. The platform is durable because no single company’s board meeting can change what it is.
The proprietary platforms that look easier at the start are competing on a different axis. They’re optimising for first-use experience. That’s a real thing, and for a solo operator building a simple five-page website with no contractors, no integration requirements, and no growth ambitions, a simpler first-use experience might genuinely be the right trade-off.
But for any business that plans to grow, to hire, to change, to still be operating in ten years — the calculus is different. The platform choice is a long-term infrastructure decision dressed up as a short-term convenience question.
And when you evaluate it as an infrastructure decision, the answer isn’t complicated.
The Takeaway
Register your domain for ten years. That’s a declaration of intent — you plan to be here.
Choose a hosting provider you trust to be around for ten years. That’s a business relationship, not a utility bill.
Choose a platform that will still exist, in recognisable form, with a thriving ecosystem, when you need it to. That’s the part of the decision most businesses get wrong.
WordPress doesn’t guarantee that your website won’t have problems. It will. Plugins break. Updates cause conflicts. Security incidents happen. These are operational realities, and they’re manageable with the right hosting infrastructure.
What WordPress does guarantee is something that no proprietary platform can match: the software you build on will not be taken away from you by a boardroom decision, an acquisition, or a pricing team looking to improve Q3 margins.
Do it once. Do it right. Build on something that won’t end.
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This is part of The 11 Truths About Web Hosting, a twelve-week series on what the hosting industry gets wrong — and what actually matters for your business.
If you’re not certain your current platform will still exist and be viable in ten years — or if you’ve never evaluated that question — we offer a free site audit at managedhosting.partners. No obligation. Just an honest picture of where you stand.
