After more than a decade with the same hosting provider, I decided to uproot it all and find another host. Because who doesn’t like the self-inflicted anxiety of migrating years of files, databases and settings over a couple of nights, right?
I got to this stage because I had a cursory look at what other hosting companies were offering and realised I could get better value for money elsewhere. So I took the leap and left my reliable-but-expensive Singapore-based hosting company to try out InMotion. So here are some things I learned over the last two weeks while making the move.
- Some months ago, I had signed up for a free-tier AWS account to play with. It’s cheap as chips. It’s also way too much work for a simple website. And I am not sure I endorse Amazon’s stranglehold of the cloud. (Where possible, I try to stay away from monopolies who make it free/cheap to get addicted to their crack.)
- Alibaba? No, thanks.
- Every single web hosting review website is a veritable ant nest of affiliate link marketing sitting atop automated posts, modal windows, and exclusive expiring deals that re-appear repeatedly in new private browser windows. They make money out of whatever you click. A useful source of opinions from real humans is from the Web Hosting Talk forums.
- Unless you use a VPS, Ghost is not available to mere plebeians on shared root-less hosting.
- cPanel is cool, but… ermahgerd the interface looks an abandoned Linux distro from the previous decade. Actually, Softaculous is uglier than if cPanel were running on Thanos’ chin.
- Currently InMotion does not provide an IPV6 address for your server space. It felt nice having an
AAAA
DNS record for a while with my old host. - There are security headers your server should be sending to ward off bad shit. Also learned about Content Security Policy (CSP) which is really painful.
- Mozilla Observatory is cool.
- Let’s Encrypt is cool.
- Filezilla is available for Linux!
- InMotion has a huge online support repository. Now that’s what I call #content.
- InMotion provides a WordPress migration guide which every proper, well-prepared, sensible hosting migrant should read first if they’ve never done it before.
- Calling WordPress’ Jetpack a plug-in is like labelling an upsized Big Mac® Extra Value Meal (with curry, chilli and tomato sauce, two types of sundaes, a salad, and a last-minute Happy Meal inclusion) a light mid-afternoon snack. Jetpack is cool but feels a bit bloat-y.
- That China’s Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure includes a plug-and-play internet for the recipient countries was an amazing revelation for my small mind.
- My disdain for influencers and social media explained in a rational, less annoyed tone.
- That Content Security Policy (CSP)? In order to implement it, I need to remove the inline CSS and JavaScript that are peppered throughout this site in a misguided attempt at inline acceleration.