Blog status update (August 2024): The site's moved to GreenGeeks
Time for another blog status update post.
The site’s changed web hosts
After six years of using DigitalOcean as a web host, I’ve moved the site to a new host, GreenGeeks. Ironically, I originally went with DigitalOcean on the spur of the moment. The host I had before that had a major crash lasting the better part of a week, forcing me to go elsewhere in a hurry.
DigitalOcean has been decent, but as it’s a self-managed virtual private server (VPS), that meant maintaining everything myself: not only WordPress updates, but also the server itself, which ran on Ubuntu Linux. I decided I wanted something that’d be less work to maintain, and hopefully dealing with fewer issues (such as the recurring spikes in CPU usage of which I couldn't identify the source). Given I’m running a basic WordPress blog with only a few hundred visitors a day (at the most), it also doesn’t seem like something that truly requires a VPS.
After reading reviews and asking online, I decided to go with a Lite tier GreenGeeks account. A few nice aspects about GreenGeeks:
cPanel access. I briefly tried using a third-party control panel for my DigitalOcean installation. However, I ultimately stuck with using the command line for running system operating system updates once a week.
Email account support. There’s 50 email addresses offered on the basic tier I’m on, though an unlimited number is available on more expensive tiers. That said, even 50 is way more email addresses than I’ll need.
50GB of storage at the basic tier, twice what I had with DigitalOcean.
GreenGeeks, per its name, focuses on ecology, including planting a tree for each customer.
Caching built-in, via the Lightspeed Cache plugin.
Migrating my site went much easier than previous migration attempts. That’s thanks to using UpdraftPlus as a backup WordPress plugin on my old site. I installed the same plugin on the new GreenGeeks site, and simply “restored” my backup (including plugins, themes, media files, etc.) from there. The only issue was adjusting the WordPress child theme I'm using; one minor customization threw up an error, which I suspect is my old account having a different (or older) PHP version?
So far, things seem to be working smoothly. If you have any questions or see any issue I’ve missed, please let me know.
Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay