Hosted WordPress demo site is a service such as WPdemo that allows you to offer your clients a way to test drive your theme or plugin before buying.
What are the benefits of using another company for demo sites vs. hosting the demo sites on your own server?
1. No resource consumption.
Hosted WordPress demo sites do not consume resources on your main site or server. This way your site will load faster because it doesn’t have to deal with handling the demo users as well as the visitors accessing your site. Some hosting companies like to track everything CPU, disk usage and access, inodes etc and when your site gets a bit over the allotted quota it may get stopped or you'll be invited to upgrade to the next plan.
2.Better security
We’re super busy nowadays and because of that some important tasks such as WordPress & plugin & theme updates may get delayed or not get done at all for months. This could potentially make the site vulnerable to get hacked or infected by malware. Most of the hosting companies allow you to add multiple domains under the same account. This is very convenient but very bad for security. This means that if one of the hosted sites under that account gets hacked the virus or the Trojan horse can spread to the other sites pretty quickly and easily. How would you like to promote pharma spam?
This makes a demo site service extremely valuable. Your primary site won’t be accidentally hacked because you’ve forgot to update a plugin or a theme.
You can focus on your business and let somebody take care the demo site management & security.
By the way if you need a nice & new WordPress hosting check out https://easywphost.com/ (may still be in private beta)
3. Shared vs Private demos
If you host your theme or plugin demo sites on your own server you’ll most likely show the public area of the theme or plugin and not to the admin area because somebody may install a plugin and gain access to the main site. Also a shared demo site is a bad idea because some users like to break things or enter some bad content just to test things.
A hosted WordPress demo site usually offers a private WordPress site to each of your potential clients. That way you guarantee that each users will have the same content as you have planned.
4. Increased sales and reduced refunds
By offering a demo site regardless if it’s on your site or on another service it would lead to increased sales and reduced refunds. When people can test drive your theme or plugin and they would figure out pretty quickly if your product works for them. That will save you administrative time to handle support & refunds requests.