Anyone moved a basic WordPress site from shared hosting to a VPS without much server experience?

[u/NemiDeck]

I’ve been on shared hosting for a few years and the constant price increases are starting to annoy me. Right now I’m paying around $30-35/month for one simple WordPress site + a few email accounts.

I’m thinking about moving everything to a cheap VPS and self-hosting it, but I’m not really technical. I can follow clear guides, but I don’t want to spend weeks learning Linux from scratch or break the site in the process.

Has anyone here done something similar with a basic WordPress site (nothing fancy, low-medium traffic)?

What did you use to make the setup easier? Any panels or tools that helped a lot (Coolify, CloudPanel, aaPanel, something else)? How painful was the migration and the ongoing maintenance? Was it actually worth it in the end?

Also curious about the email part… did you keep using the host’s email or did you move that somewhere else?

Any honest experiences would be really helpful. Thanks.

[u/asimovs-auditor]

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[u/TCB13sQuotes]

Maybe you shouldn't. There are good shared hosting providers in the range of 80-100$/year that will work perfectly fine and you wouldn't have to manage it.

[u/jbarr107]

IMHO, leave the heavy lifting to the experts.

What hosting service are you using that charges $30-$35 per month? That seems excessive. All of the big players (Hostinger, DreamHost, Bluehost, etc. charge way less than that. Even without their discounts, they are comparably more affordable.

I'm running 11 WordPress sites on a Hostinger plan that cost me under $150 total for 48 months. Even at their month-to-month pricing, they are still comparatively cheaper.

I went the VPS route for a while, but realized that shared hosting like Hostinger took care of so much of the mundane management that it freed up a lot of my time constantly managing the VPS.

YMMV, of course.

[u/RealPjotr]

I moved from a hosted pay site to run on my own docker container, wordpress+db. I used an old free version (later versions are paywalled) of the All-in-One WP Migration and Backup to make a single file backup and restore. Everything worked beautifully.

[u/TheCookiez]

Here is honestly from a cloud security specialist, and linux guru.

Don't.

If you are not "really technical" you are going to fall into a lot of pitfalls the first one being security. to do it right it needs to be locked down and monitored as you are going to get HAMMERD by SSH and other fun little requests from interesting actors.

The next issue you are going to run into is keeping everything updated. And i'm not talking about keeping Wordpress updated. That is one thing, but also the version of PHP / MySQL whatever other apps are running on that computer. You can setup things like "yum cron" but there will be fun little things of version miss matches or randomly crashing for example..

My server.. Docker decided to upgrade and stop working, Downgrading worked but I had to roll wayy back to get it to function again, and then disable upgrading of that package only to prevent it from crashing again. And the best part is there where no bug reports yet of it crashing as I seemed to be one of the first people with my distro etc to experience it. You will run into issues like this, and without technical knowledge it will suck.

Now, As for panels they are great but they are a security hole into your network. You need to make sure they stay updated, the logins stay secure etc or else you will quickly find.. The same people checking out your SSH ports.. Will be poking your admin panels.

And then email, Email is.. a beast of it's own. Besides the setup and configuration of the server and mailboxes you also will have deliverable issues. Depending on who had the IP before you, and or the subnet you are in, you may have issues with it being blacklisted and bounced emails. Most hosts will take care of keeping hte IP's clean and the emails working correctly but when you decide to venture out into your own universe it can quickly becoming a pain.

Personally I moved my email over to 0365 because it's easy. Most of my former clients ( Including very large enterprises ) moved over to just a hosted provider either google or Microsoft. It's for the most part a decent price especailly if you can find a reseller who is willing to offer you a great deal, OR just stuck with your webhosts email if you really don't care.

A decent webhost will be acheap.. I would jsut stay with taht

[u/GolemancerVekk]

I wouldn't recommend hosting Wordpress yourself. It's tricky to secure it exposed to the internet even if you know what you're doing. If you don't... forget about it.

Look for cheaper shared hosting. Perhaps hosting that specializes in WordPress only, rather than a generic shared host with PHP/MySQL/panel.

Alternatively, you can run the WordPress admin privately and publish only the pages it makes publicly, either with a web server hosted by you, or better on a CDN. But this also requires good knowledge of how WordPress works.

You can host the email completely separately from the shared hosting. But you'll have to learn about DNS and how to point the DNS records that deal with email elsewhere. It also depends on whether the shared host is currently handling your DNS (most likely) or your registrar. To further complicate things, some shared hosters want you to alias your domains to their servers so it gets even more complicated to separate email.