I have been doing extensive testing with WPMUDEV plugins and services and I find them valuable and potentially game changer. First, I have not found another solution with the same scope.
However, I understand that The Hub was designed for end users, not for machines. In other words, The Hub is designed for a person, lets say a freelance, that wants to sell hosting to his customers and use the plugins.
However I want to include a BUSINESS point of view. My company growing really fast, and we are in the IT world. We work with amazon. I will cover some aspects we found not workable for businesses and some others that may require improvement.
The Hub Client – Whitelabel
This is a great tool. However, a company like mine, already have a customer portal for all the services we provide. We use SSO across all the sevices. We found out that client login in the Hub needs an independent set of credentials for the customer, and the login can not be integrated with SSO. This automatically defeats the purpose of using The Hub, plus there is no API to at least build a custom UI ourselves. I would say SSO is a must. Ideally this is setup using OAuth, but it can also be setup programatically where we can generate a login token and pass it to the Hub for automatic login, just as stripe does. In this flow, the default login screen becomes irrelevant.
The Hub – Usage Quotas
Our company has many many servers online. Currently we can not set per site quotas for backups and CDN. This is a business risk as one site can suddely use a lot of CDN bandwith without any control. And then we can not gurantee we can collect a payment from the offending customer. Same thing with backups. It is really necessary that we can limit usage on a per site basis.
Uptime Monitoring
The current uptime monitoring can only send alerts by email. However for a larger operation this is not efficient. We have support systems and more that help us managing incidents. For this use case, it will be more efficient that uptime alerts can be sent to a webhook with enough context data so we can process the event and feed it into our systems.
Backups
Some of our customers have strict levels of confidentiality and they won’t allow to store their backups in WPMUDEV controlled locations. We need more freedom to select if the backup can be stored in WPMUDEV or not, and be able to use AWS S3 (for example) as an exclusive destination, not going through WPMUDEV servers. I know you may not allow this because you want a business model (income), but we can tolerate a charge for the amount of backups stored on a montly basis, to compensate for such fucntionality. Of course I would expect signinficant savings compared to the pay by storage model.
The Hub – Provisioning
We have automated systems to provision our customer accounts. We are unable to provision clients automatically into the Hub, the process needs to be done manually, which is not optimal for a larger operation like ours.
The Hub – Metrics / Stats API
We have automated monitoring systems and The Hub lacks the ability to query the metrics and stats from an API, in such a way we can integrate this information in our integrated monitoring dashboards. Currently, we need to go site by site manually to be able to consult any information. On example of a problem is the broken link checker. Our support team needs to login and go site by site identifying which sites have issues, and then go to each report to find out the detailed information, while they could do more efficiently from out support desk with an automated ticket that has all the information previously populated from The Hub API.
Plugins
An additional feature is that we can disallow a wordpress user (even an administrator) to delete the WPMUDEV plugins and that we can control the modules visibility remotely, so non active modules are not show at all to wordpress users. This is important because we have found out some users deactivate the plugins or mess up the configurations, and we can not notice when that happens. So a deactivation and configuration change alerts will also be important to determine whether a broken site is responsibility of the end user.
WPMUDEV and The Hub are really a great idea an have a great value proposition. We are still giving it a chance because we see pontential. We are willing to help as much as we can to see a Business grade version of it.