I’ve been trying to develop a regular rhythm to posting, again. Last week, however, I had to stop for some badly needed maintenance and cost reduction by changing web site hosts. This turned out to be a remarkably painless experience, thankfully.
A little over a year ago, I moved my site from a hosted service to my own Amazon EC2 instance, as I talked about in How do I look, now? That move was desperately needed and it wasn’t too difficult, either. What I underestimated (or underappreciated) was the need to keep up with the OS updates, WordPress updates, certificate updates, etc. The cost wasn’t much different from what I’d been paying and it gave me the access to the nuts and bolts that I felt I needed after the previous hosting service lost two months of content that I described in What’s with the radio silence?
But, with power comes responsibility. In this case the responsibility to keep all the aforementioned nuts and bolts properly tightened–a task that seemed to take up much of my scarce and fragile attention span.
So, as of last weekend, docsbydesign.com is now running on a managed WordPress site hosted by EasyWP. Migrating my site was made easy by using All-in-One WP Migration. The migration tool makes a complete backup of the old site’s files and database, which also serves as a handy site backup, and then updates the destination site to look just like the old one. So close to the original, I had to add a new file to be able to tell them apart. The only challenges, if you can call them that, involved resetting my DNS to point my domain to the new host and get a new certificate for the site. These two challenges were solved with a couple of emails to their support team who responded quickly.
One thing that I like about EasyWP hosting, as compared to some others I looked at while shopping, was they provide FTP and database access to the site, just in case. What I really like is that the plug-ins and themes update automatically. My intention to be “hands-on” with the updates and maintenance of the previous EC2 hosting turned out to be a lot more trouble than it was worth.
Overall, I’ve been happy with the Domain hosting provided by Namecheap. I’m using them to manage eight domains and they’re inexpensive, easy to use, and their support is very responsive.