Our main website https://fixittoday.com is hosted on WP Engine. I wanted a wordpress host that was reliable and did things that I didnt have to worry about like SSL certificates and what not. It wasn’t the cheapest hosting but honestly its $30 a month. Well, we got our yearly renewal email and it made me start thinking. Maybe we should just host it ourself. We host our application server, why not the main website?
Well, this is where things went in a spiral and I make things complicated. For $30 a month its cheap enough to just leave it there and not have to worry. But its money we are spending we don’t really need to. We have more than the capability of hosting it ourself. We recently moved everything behind Cloudflare so its automatically provided a SSL certificate which is one less thing for me to worry about. Why not just host it ourself? We have other sites on our servers that I have never worried about, why am I worried about this one? Probably because its my bread and butter.
Well, more reason to move is WP Engine charges more by bandwidth and visits per month. We are nowhere close to the limits on the plan we are on but it still makes you worry about the future. $30 a month turns into $400 per month pretty quick. We have a whole bunch of servers that there really is no reason we can’t host it ourself. But $30 is a cheap price to not have to worry and let me focus on everything else. Well, there is a lot of drama going on with WP Engine with their private equity buyout (or investment) now the drama with WordPress and WP Engine itself….maybe we should just go to another host like Rocket.net. They tout they are the fastest and apparently you get Cloudflare enterprise and cache your whole site across the Cloudflare network. For $25 a month, I can’t buy that from Cloudflare.
So, host it ourselves and have some paranoia that something will go wrong. Keep it on WP Engine which is easy and has been fine for the last year or so, or move it to Rocket which may be faster but also has bandwidth and visitor limits but the visits limit is MUCH higher (like 10X). So…decisions, decisions. I think Rocket makes the most sense. I cant buy Cloudflare and host it myself for cheaper than Rocket. Ok, so we will make the move…as soon as the SEO guys are done building new pages. Don’t want to lose pages in the migration. Rocket is the sensible choice right?
