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by skilled 1538 days ago
I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a WordPress site ready to go. You just need your own domain name (and even then, it is still cheaper than what WP.com is quoting).

I'm not some sysadmin guru either, and mostly just look up tutorials when trying to achieve some goal. E.g. Install better caching system, optimize for ram usage, etc.

But yes, I have been hosting my sites like this for over a decade so for me it feels like second nature. In saying that, I am sure there are other platforms that provide free blog hosting and can be used as alternatives. Sadly, it means you'll lose the WordPress.com subdomain, but also access to their network of bloggers.

I remember in 2012, I started a poetry blog on WordPress.com and in a few months I had 2,000 subscribers - all of whom found me through their discovery feature. It was quite nice.
2 comments
panicpanicpanic 1538 days ago
It was, right? I hope anyone who's considering designing an alternative keeps this in mind. It was one of the best things about WordPress.com. This is also why I'm currently considering micro.blog.
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AussieWog93 1538 days ago
>I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a WordPress site ready to go.

I have no sysadmin/web experience, but do understand the terminal reasonably well enough from my old job as a SWE.

I currently manage a Wordpress installation on a ridiculously performant [1] $6/mo DigtalOcean droplet without issue.

For me, I struggled a bit with their default Wordpress plugin, but there's this fantastic (also free) droplet called Cyberpanel. It's basically an open-source alternative to CPanel, and offers a graphical frontend for lots of common tasks (domain management, auto-renewing SSL, PHP settings, deployment of WordPress and other sites).

Migrating from my old host was as easy as installing a plugin (All-in-One WP Migration, IIRC) on both the old server and the new DO droplet and then updating the domain records to point to DO.

All in all, maybe a couple of afternoons of screwing around, but absolutely a worthwhile (and economically valuable!) skill to have.

[1] I think I measured something like 1000 page loads per second (with WP Fastest Cache; crapped out at around 30 views/s without!) before CPU hit 100%. There are free stress test sites online that let you do this.

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