Webhosting your own Wordpress

Former Member

Well it turns out that I have a lot more webspace than I previously thought. I have been with a certain company for a lot of years and it seems the legacy package that I'm on, no longer exists. This now leads me to have a lot of space and the ability to do MySQL database thingies.

I have managed to install my own wordpress onto my own space, it works. I was wondering if anyone had any useful tips and tricks, advice or useful plugins they might use? Rather than make this all about me, I was wondering if it might be useful to help instigate a discussion on the pros and cons, and what you guys may or may not use wordpress for.

Former Member

Hey G-Raffe,

I use wordpress for simple blogging - but also my old work use wordpress for there own website, and it works really well. I think it's about linking your wordpress to other SNS accounts, so when you do post something - it will automatically share across all your SNS networks.

I know I prefer wordpress over all the other sites, and I also use it for my photography, as it's great to be able to express myself freely.

With views, like I say above, it is good to connect your wordpress to your SNS. For example, if you connected it with Twitter, and made a post, various people could RT your content, and it would go 'viral'

Hope this helps a little bit.

Former Member

Total Cache (or WP-Super Cache)
CloudFlare
Secure WP (many of these types)
Broken Link Checker
All In One SEO
Askimet (anti-spam)
Greet Box (if you use social networks, its useful to be more personalised)
Jetpack
Google XML sitemaps
Socialble or ShareThis
qTranslate or another one that I can't remember the name of, but it basically shows language options and pushes your site to Google Translate for you. Though it's not that useful I guess with Chrome having this built in.

There's a few plugins I always used when I used WordPress, I've moved away from it because of security/resources. I don't want anything fancy. As my site gets more active (though I don't really advertise or show it much love), I'm switching to a flat-file blog and having most of the resources hosted elsewhere, saves me the trouble.

The thing you'll want to consider is usage. You have have lots of space/databases/bandwidth and whatever but you likely don't have the processing power to run tons of different plugins (especially when you get more visitors) which could get your site shut down. This is where it's handy to use caching and CloudFlare to reduce that load (even if your blog isn't very active)

Former Member

Thanks for all of that, it's a pretty good list and I have checked a few of those plugins out (research on a test install) and they seem pretty simple enough to use. It is quite helpful to have a list as you have put up there, because there are so many thousands of plugins and widgets to choose from.

Former Member

All In One SEO, Better WP Security are two important ones regardless of the type of website.

Former Member

I found that the all in one SEO was really good, but for the benefit of what it was offering it seemed to slow things down noticeably for me. I found that it didn't really provide me with a killer advantage.

I'm currently running 3 different wordpress installs, one is my blog, one is a very basic 2 page site advertising myself to employers, the third is an aggregator for scottish referendum news (three links in my signature). I have found that my web skills in general are improving. I run another install on a subdomain which allows me to completely tinker around and do as I wish, without wrecking anything. That ability to tinker is a big advantage.

I would say that between the three sites, I'm using the following plugins, though there are others which I have not listed:

Acunetix WP Security
Akismet
Broken Link Checker (helpful on the blog site, lots of old links)
Disqus Comment System
FD Feedburner Plugin
Google XML Sitemaps
Jetpack by WordPress.com (ruthless with what is turned on within this)
Redirection
WP-Optimize (only run once a month and clears out old post edits).

Former Member

Do you not run a local WAMP/LAMP/MAMP server? It makes tinkering so much easier.