Hosting fredrocha.net following the WordPress Happy Path
This post was first published on fredrocha.net.
While on the lookout for a hosting provider for my personal website (and others I run) I stumbled upon an article by Chris Coyer in which he talks about the developer Happy Path.
The concept of Happy Path really is a life mantra. Just like the useful “Pull, don’t push”, it tells you to find the most pleasurable and effortless context in which to work in. If you’re loving what you’re doing and do not feel like it’s work at all, then stay on that lane. Or path.
The work I’ve been doing over the years — more than ten, as of this writing — using WordPress really makes it feel pleasurable, potent, painless. I can express myself using it, especially since paired with the reliable LAMP stack. Add to that the web standards of HTML, CSS and Javascript and I’m greatly equipped to find the best solution for the need at hand.
With this in mind, I set out to search for a hosting provider that would be optimized for WordPress projects. According to Chris, these were the table stakes I should be on the lookout for:
As I mentioned in my comment on the article, it was for me a non-negotiable requisite that the hosting infrastructure was powered by sustainable sources of energy. It’s the second decade of the 21st century, we’re done with cheap, CO2 emitting sources of energy, so let’s transition, shall we?
I decided then to give Kualo.com a go.
I was blown away, and I am not turning back.
The new version of my website, https://fredrocha.net, is blazingly fast, due to an out-of-the-box cache plugin called LiteSpeed Cache. Because Kualo fits in the Happy Path philosophy if you’re building with WordPress, they give you the option of using this plugin with just a flick of the switch.
As I flipped the switch I wondered why I spent all these years generating each page for each visitor. You live, you learn. Take a tour of https://fredrocha.net and see for yourself how fast it is.
The folks at Kualo gave me a pat on the back, too. I blushed a little.
I was also stunned with how seamless it was to create and install a SSL certificate. Again, Kualo takes care of everything for you. At one moment I was getting my initial, standard setup ready, exploring the user-friendly-if-powerful cPanel interface, and the next moment my SSL cert was running and my website supported https. Multiple thumbs up!
One last word about their support. It’s responsive. All three times I wrote to them with minor if contrived questions they got back to me with the solution in less than 10 minutes. This being a personal project I was working on it during the weekend. That made zero difference. They were still very fast and reliable when getting back to me. It’s reassuring to know that if anything goes wrong with one of my websites, Kualo will be reachable, regardless of when it happens.
Take a look at Kualo’s offering, and give them a try. I can particularly vouch for them if you are willing to thread the WordPress Happy Path™.
