In 2020, I migrated this blog to A2Hosting – I know that because I wrote about it at the time. I’ve just migrated again and am writing this brief post in part to check that everything is working (including sending via email to subscribers).
I was up for renewal again this year at A2Hosting (now Hosting.com), looking at $450 for the next three years. I have gotten both more skilled at and more interested in self-hosted web stuff in recent years, so I took the plunge and started renting a little DigitalOcean Droplet virtual machine. I installed a little Docker Compose stack of these containers:
- WordPress
- MariaDB backend
- Caddy frontend for SSL (and to lay the way for hosting other projects on this box)
AI tools helped me set that up, at the moment that’s DeepSeek v4 Flash. Then I exported my WordPress blog from my old admin panel, imported it on the new site, and it scraped all the media files from the old site. That’s all I had over on the old host. You’re now reading this page served from the DigitalOcean Droplet!
I took the occasion to choose a new theme, Twenty Twenty-Five. I hadn’t realized that my old theme, Twenty Twenty, was not 100% compatible with the “new” Gutenberg block style that WordPress uses these days. This is a nice quality of life upgrade.
Unfortunately I still have a lousy sense of style, including web design. I cycled through different layouts and color schemes, loving none of them. This was the best I could do but I don’t love the main font or the colors. If something is hard to read, let me know, especially if you have an idea for a better set of choices!
The Droplet is about half the price of the hosted solution, but that’s not the only advantage. I can now also host family members’ WordPress blogs at no additional cost to myself using the shared infrastructure, including backups I’m piping to a separate cloud provider (Hetzner, in Germany). And I can host any other web projects that need a home. I have tinkered a little with a tool that will help me mealplan, basically suggesting to me what I should cook each week. If I ever get it running, I’ll host it on this droplet too.
Just need to remember to do my maintenance on this VM and install upgrades. I have calendar reminders for that.
I started this blog in 2015 which means I lasted five years at the first host and six at the second. I hope I can keep the self-hosting going indefinitely!