Recently, I went from having a minimalist website to suddenly being HexDSL, WordPress user! It was quite an event. I migrated from hexdsl.co.uk to hexdsl.com, hosted by NameCheap via EasyWP. Well, while all that was excellent and I was happy the renewal that would be due in a year worried me, not a lot, but it was something I had to consider.
The EasyWP hosting would have cost £30 a year.
The E-mail hosting was £20 (ish) a year.
The actual Domain renewal was to be about £10.
There was some faffery regarding SSL certificates too, which while not challenging, was going to be time-consuming every six months-year. (a result of having to remote certify)
The whole setup was set to cost me £50 a year + domain registration, which I count separately as it’s an ‘essential’, also there’s the $10 a month cost of hosting via a DigitalOcean VPS.
The only concern I had was the visitor limit that EasyWP had. You see, up until switching to WP I had no idea who many visitors I had. Turns out, it was a lot more than I expected.
Then I saw this:
https://appsumo.com/products/wordpress-hosting-on-cpanel/#appsumo-plans
(now I know, it’s a link to an ad. This is not a sponsored post, I get nothing if you clicked that. BUT people ARE going to ask me for it. Here it is.)
That link over on AppSumo got me :
- 1 Site with 10 GB disk space
- WordPress Package Installation
- Visitor Traffic – Unlimited
- FTP Accounts
- Email Accounts – 5
-
Max Email Sending Limit – Unlimited
- Email Accounts Space – 5 GB each
- Lifetime Let’s Encrypt SSL
- Malware & Virus Protection
- MySQL Databases – Unlimited
- CGI Access
For, $11.40, which seems a little cheap.
I was suspicious. Given that I was not using hexdsl.co.uk for anything, I checked out and gave them that domain. I forwarded my DNS and was blown away by it! – it’s not as fast as my VPS, self-hosted solution, but it’s a one-off payment of less than a tenner, Sterling!
I did some testing and switched hexdsl.com over to it. There was a little down-time, sure, but it’s all up and running now and honestly, I’m impressed.
Also, because of the way the Cpanel hosting works I could also install Wallabag and TinyTiny-RSS meaning I don’t even need my VPS any more. I’m happy, and I have saved so much money long term. Even if the company goes bust in 2 years I have saved money!
So, this is my way of saying: Sorry for the down time!