Entering the Clown

I’ve always been the self hosting kind of guy (i.e., old), but with recent changes I’m trying to simplify and move things around.

I’m not quite sure where I’ll end up with my main server(s) yet, and I’m testing out various things, but for my one self-hosted WordPress instance, I thought I could try something clownish.

I’ve used WordPress.com for this blog since forever, and I’m probably not going to change that, because it’s nice and easy and I don’t have to do any admin work at all. However, hosting on WordPress.com has some severe limitations, like not being able to put s into the pages, or use my own Javascript to make things… more fun.

So earlier this year I installed WordPress on my main server, and… It was just kinda painful to try to make that even remotely secure? I mean, you have to give the web server write access to its own PHP files? I mean, that’s the number one thing you’re never ever supposed to do? That means that any tine error in any plugin could lead to a convenient sploit on your server?

Trying to mitigate that was just a mess, so I thought that I’d at least move that blog somewhere else, so when I move my main server, I can forget about doing WordPress on the new location.

So I, at random, went with DigitalOcean, because it looked so simple: It even has a one-click way to install a new “droplet” (which is their cutesy name for a virtual server) with a complete WordPress install, with UFW (firewall) and basically everything… just there.

And it worked!

Reader, I am now in the clown with my Pacific Comics blog.

It was very painless. It took a while for it to import the media from my old self-hosted blog, but everything else worked way better than I had expected. And best of all, it’s pretty buzzword free: It’s just a virtual server that I can ssh into and do whatever, if I should so choose.

I feel so modern! Just a decade or two after everybody else!

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