And they, or an unwitting employee, start using it to communicate information they shouldn't.
And their account gets owned. (Keep in mind, the content is no longer just public web pages...)
And... Even if the web site hosting should have been done this way, they still needed help/advice/pressure to be more clueful about their IT deployment and use.
A lot of small businesses look for the minimum and think things should just work.
Separately, as a favor, I spent a weekend cleaning such a business's systems after an employee clicked on a malicious attachment.
When I told them what that service was worth (particularly on short notice and over a weekend) -- mind you, I wasn't charging them anything, just trying to put the fear of God into them to prevent a repeat and to motivate some better policy and behavior -- they completely balked. One partner "called someone" and claimed a simple sub $100 scan with a packaged product would have taken care of the problem. (Never mind that they had multiple infections on multiple machines and a raft of outdated products presenting serious security implications.)
They were in a cash flow crisis. If I hadn't had billing up by Monday morning, they would have been severely screwed. Yet, they were unwilling to assign any significant dollar amount to what I'd done.
The other side of businesses that pay too much for custom web development, is businesses that treat their IT systems like a consumer-level Windows XP box. And we know what happens to those.
P.S. IT, IS... whichever acronym floats your boat.
It is really hard to have vulerabilities with static html. Similarly, hosting these costs nothing. Usually in the ballpark of $3/year, the DNS alone is the dominate cost. And if they do get a sudden inrush of traffic, static hosts need to see a thousand times more load than stock wordpress before they fall down.
Come to think of it, I've never had a client that was the correct size for Wordpress. They were either way too small or way too large.
I had a client who wanted a static site, but at the last minute decided they needed a "news" sidebar on every page that they could update. This was before any of the off the shelf solutions existed (to mixing static and dynamic content), so I wrote some javascript (before jquery made ajax easy) that grabbed the content from a flat file.
Long story short, a few years later, they had someone on staff who knew some html, and they basically turned that tiny sidebar from a div displaying 2 or 3 paragraphs of text into an entire website--complete with oversized videos, rotating image headers, and dozens of links.
Also I hadn't thought of S3 - that's a good shout.
The transfer rate is $1/GB. If you don't have many pictures and serve pre-gzipped html/css/js (needs a custom .htaccess) the bill can be very low.
I want to punch all developers in the mouth who think a custom application for this type of situation is a good idea. They give us all a bad name and exacerbate the cost problem.
Web development has not reached the state where non-technical end users can maintain websites. In theory, sure, in practice, there's tons of money to be made fixing hacked sites and cleaning up years of technical debt.
I would not recommend Wordpress for anything other than a simple blog. Do anything else with it, you need a developer on staff. And a simple blog will never be enough for the needs of a small business.
I'd much rather work on some 90s-era custom-built app than the vast majority of brutally hacked together Wordpress sites.
It's not a small problem, its a huge one, and the primary reason why I can no longer recommend Wordpress.
Latest WP "hack" via botnets was because of weak logins and passwords which are set by the users. Can you blame WP devs for that?
Speaking about upgrading; making updates easier it`s also one of the goals of the project. Also it isn`t that hard when you develop WP sites using information from WordPress Codex docs.
I hope it will get better with time, and as i wrote people are working to get things better. Sorry to hear that you are not going to recommend WordPress any longer.
Can you suggest any more elegant solution? In my opinion WordPress is good solution with great community.
With many different people you get a lot of different levels of deployment, so maybe you didn`t have a luck?
As far as CMSes go, I was pretty impressed with Umbraco. It lets you design the client interface that they use to update the site. It's .NET, but I've yet to see a better solution.
The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application.
The only reason the majority of small businesses think they need custom functionality is because they don't know enough to know what they're really trying to do. Try to listen to what the client wants to accomplish, not how they want to accomplish it, and see if you can come up with an off the shelf solution to their problems (or refer them to someone else who can).
Think about all those times someone on stackoverflow asks how to do something in a really roundabout way that seems wrong. The first question you ask is "what are you trying to accomplish?" Most of the time there is a simpler way to do it.
Edit:
[1] When I say wordpress, I mean wordpress/drupal/cushycms not just wordpress. Basically anything where you're not charging the client to build a custom blog/CMS engine, or charging $2k for a custom design.