Consolidating my web hosting

When my partner’s Squarespace subscription came up for renewal, I thought “Wait a minute. That’s a lot of money for functionality she’s not even fully using.” So I started looking around for alternatives and landed on WordPress when I realised I had a spare domain slot sitting unused on my shared hosting plan. A week later we relaunched her online store and cancelled Squarespace which reduced our hosting costs significantly. Fewer expenses means more profit so what’s not to like?

But I wasn’t done yet. My own online store was on an expensive managed hosting plan that was overkill for my current needs. At the time I figured I needed a powerful plan to set my store up for success when in reality shared hosting would’ve been just fine for now. Upgrading later on was always an option. I had known this for a while but couldn’t be bothered with migrating to another provider. It sounded like a headache. And what if things broke? That wasn’t a good reason though, so I spent a Friday night moving it to my shared hosting plan, which turned out to be really easy with the Duplicator plugin.

Finally, I moved another WordPress blog of mine to the same hosting plan the two stores were already on. It had better performance too, thanks to Redis caching and LiteSpeed which was a non-negotiable now.

I used to dismiss shared hosting in the past because they were too slow or overcrowded, but it’s come a long way. I’ve now consolidated three websites onto a single shared hosting plan and saved about $450 USD per year.

The only other hosting I happily pay for is this blog that will remain on Blot for the foreseeable future because I just like this setup too much to give it up.