That was one hell of a journey.
My initial (outdated) post can be found here
Many things have changed since then. I now have a dedicated email address (feedback@sandboxthoughts.com) for the website, I have moved off the Managed WordPress Hosting provider, and I have a new look on things (in other words, I’m on an admin power trip).
The website was down for a couple weeks or so as I was figuring out what to do after having so much trouble with Nestify and their incredibly slow support, but it’s back up and now running on a different cloud server that I will avoid naming for reasons stated in their policy.
It’s entirely possible to find out what service I’m using if one is determined enough, but I still don’t want to openly reveal it.
Why I didn’t go for Managed WordPress Hosting in the end
Simply put, I could not find any good options for my budget and use case. After spending weeks doing research, Kinsta (no, Pagely is far out of budget) was the only best option I’ve managed to find, while still being beyond my budget and use case (WPX’s blog was too “shouty” and unprofessional). Cloudways was initially my first option, with a reasonable terms of service and privacy policy, but they required that I verify myself with a government-issued Photo ID that I immediately refused to give.
It was disappointing, as Cloudways didn’t really have any significant competition (see G2 reviews) within their budget range, but I did another few days of digging and found Nestify, which had very promising features. Unfortunately, I ran into many basic issues and was lost for a few days, partially due to the opaque nature of managed hosting services. Even though I have zero experience in anything server-related, I would probably have enjoyed learning how to troubleshoot the problems myself than waiting helplessly for support.
This aspect of managed hosting isn’t a problem for most—it’s actually the main selling point, unless support consistently is slow to reply, leaving your website in limbo for half a day every time something doesn’t work.
In addition, I didn’t feel like I “owned” my website due to it being managed by a middleman, which led to some self-censoring in my earlier posts (now edited). Perhaps I would have felt the same way with any managed hosting provider, but for now I’m satisfied with renting my own cloud server.
How the experience went
To be honest, I would have stuck with Nestify if any of their payment methods actually worked and just endured the relatively minor problems (I mean, the server technically works), but it did not, so here we are.
I started by looking through reviews and forums again hoping to find an alternative, but my first round of research had already eliminated virtually every provider except for Kinsta and WPX which are both far overkill for a simple static blog. Left with no option, I started wondering if doing it myself was really so difficult.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy. As it turns out, just because a service doesn’t advertise itself as “Managed WordPress Hosting” doesn’t mean it would be difficult to host a WordPress website. In fact, for my particular service, most of the technically challenging parts had already been handled by experienced programmers so all I had to do was click a button and everything was automatically installed in five minutes. The remaining steps were as simple as downloading KiTTY (or PuTTY) and connecting to the server using SSH, pasting the password, then setting up the WordPress account with login details.
From then, it was simply an act of registering my DNS record to match the server’s IP and it just… worked.
The troubleshooting experience
Okay, setting up the server wasn’t actually that easy, and this is actually the third server, but that was one of the first benefits I immediately noticed: the ability to simply nuke the server and start again from scratch after screwing up the installation (don’t ask how). With no knowledge about what I was doing as I blindly copied steps, the last thing I wanted to do was troubleshoot an issue that would take me days to resolve.
One of the main problems I ran into was with SSL. As we all know, HTTPS is a basic human right, so even though my second server was working fine without HTTPS, I couldn’t allow it to live any longer (and also because HTTPS Everywhere would scream at anyone trying to access it, including myself).
“Third time’s the charm” is one of my favourite rules in life when paired with a healthy and necessary dose of selection bias. The third attempt is where I threw out the more complex features and focused on simply getting the website running, which worked well enough for me to try and throw my 245 MB WordPress backup at the server.
Uh oh, maximum upload size of 16 MB? Time to contact the admin… wait, that’s me.
I was lucky enough to have found a tutorial quite quickly, and soon I was able to throw the (relatively) massive file at my tiny server… which caused it to hang for the next two hours with the CPU and memory usage pegged at 100%. Lesson learned, don’t leave all the unwanted, deactivated plugins in the WordPress backup… I deleted them all shortly afterwards.
But before that, I ran into another serious problem: the backup carried over the login credentials from the previous site, of which I no longer had access to as I always used Nestify’s interface to log into my WordPress admin panel. But… I’m the admin, right? I can do whatever I want, so I accessed the server using SSH, directly added a new admin account for myself, then deleted the old admin account.
Of course, because it’s me we’re talking about, I lost the password for that account almost immediately and found myself locked out of the new account before I managed to set up the email functionality (so the reset password button doesn’t actually send an email). Well, I’m the admin. I created another new account, logged in to register the Gmail API and successfully sent a working password reset email.
I could not have done any of that without root access, and the fact I didn’t have to wait for support meant the only thing limiting me was how fast I could solve the problems myself—I didn’t have to wait for anyone to reply to my tickets or chat.
Conclusion
All in all, for someone with zero prior server experience, I’m impressed with what I managed to accomplish in just half a day. My needs were simple, and most of the code was already written by other people—all I had to do was click some buttons and install them.
I still don’t fully understand everything (I’m barely using a percentage of what Apache 2 and Ubuntu is capable of), and if I had more complex, business-related demands I would still look for others to help me manage the website (probably Kinsta), but this is good enough for me.
(Side note: I still don’t know how to create a file.)