Hi, I'm very new to the world of modern website infrastructure. I want to make a small Wordpress site. In the past I've used Digital Ocean. I installed the OS and the required software for the site and wondered, even though I was enjoying myself, am I putting more effort than necessary to run a website? I've never used a commercial webhost and I'm not really sure what it has to offer, does it pale in comparison with what you can do with Digital Ocean.

Well thanks for reading, if you have any insight to the direction I should go with this, let me know thanks - Tangent

With commercial web hosting the hosting company will (or should!) do all the things around O/S patching, security updates to apache, firewalls, etc.

In practise, if you go with a large company they are generally good about this kind of thing. On the downside you don't get full root/shell access, you can't install apache/php modules whenever you feel like it, can't run anything that requires shell access.

Which direction you go should depend on what you want to achieve. If you're looking to have your wordpress site, post to it, install plugins for that, and generally get on with the content side of your website then it makes sense to go with a host that does web hosting with a database. Wordpress is "mature" enough that most hosting companies support it. From memory GoDaddy offers a LOT of software with a "click to install" option and wordpress is one of them.

If you want to keep maintaining and running a server, keeping everything up to date and dealing with firewalls etc. then stick with what you have.

1 members found this post helpful.

i don't know.
just for you to consider:
self-host everything
it probably would mean quite a bit more effort than you asked for, but any old unused computer/laptop could become your blog server!

Assuming your terms and conditions with your ISP allow you to run hosting on your connectivity.

I'd stick with digital ocean. tentenths outlined drawbacks of shared commercial hosting, I used a shared host for years and did miss the root/shell accessibility.

Digital Ocean is very reasonable, their fees would probably end up cheaper than self-hosting at home, by the time you pay for 24x7 electricity use, probably needing to upgrade your internet connection to allow hosting a web server on it, dns issues (they WILL occur), and much slower bandwidth and cpu speed than what you get at DO, you'll end up with a slower website that is down more often while you work on stuff, and don't even try if you need dynamic dns.

I have a minimal centos 7 digital ocean server with ispconfig3 for a control panel, and it works far better than when I had my own servers here. Also my electric bill was cut in about half when I turned off the 24x7 server I had been using.

$0.000000000000002

I've been with GoDaddy for six years, because someone I trust recommended them.

I have just a little tiny site, but I have found their service and tech support to be excellent. I have no experience with Digital Ocean, though I've heard good things about them, so I can't speak to Digital Ocean one way or other.

Just my two cents.