Searching for a web hosting company to host your blog or site can be a really time-consuming, frustrating, and draining task. That’s a fact. I know people who have been publishing sites for years and who have still not found a hosting solution that they are completely satisfied with.

Today I am sharing my experience to help you find a perfect host for your needs.

Yes, we need to focus on your needs in order to find the best web hosting solution for you. The biggest mistake you can make is to read page upon page of reviews on web hosting forums, without first carefully analysing your particular use-case. Sure, some web hosts are more reliable than others, some of them have great customer service and others seem hell bent on making their customers lives miserable, but that is not the most important thing to start from.

I started my adventure with web hosting many years back, and my first web hosting experience was far from positive. In fact, the first company I had chosen suddenly disappeared, taking with it all its clients’ data. Can you believe that? That cost me much grief as in those times I used to rely on backups provided by the hosting company itself. Which means that I had no access to my data and neither to the backups.

After that traumatic experience, I decided that I was going to change my strategy with hosting completely.

Here’s what I did.

First of all at that time I switched over to WordPress, and have been using this CMS for any website I build since then. If you’re building sites and haven’t used WordPress, you’re really missing out, go check it out immediately!

Anyway, the first step of my strategy was to take responsibility for my own backups. After much research, I decided to use BlogVault.

With backups taken care of, I proceeded to take a good look at the websites I needed to host. I had a whole range of sites, some of them my own, and others of friends of mine. Not all of them had the same requirements, a few would do with basic hosting while others like WP Mayor needed specialized hosting to handle a large number of visitors.

By now I’m sure you’re realising that you cannot go searching for the cheapest web hosting, the fastest web host, etc. because there ain’t no such thing.

There is no best web hosting provider.

But…

There is a best hosting solution for each of your sites.

What are we saying here? We’re simply saying that your search for web hosting needs to start from the needs of each and every website you want to host, and once you know what you want, it’s relatively easy to find a good web host.

I told you that for a site like WP Mayor I needed specialised hosting. Why is that? Well, that particular site has a global audience, so the site must be loading fast from any corner of the world. That suggests the need for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so anyone can get the page elements loaded from a location closest to him.

What about server power? That site receives thousands of monthly visitors, and so I needed a server which packed a punch in its setup, and was able to handle sudden spikes of traffic. Caching was definitely on the cards here, together with raw computing power. Besides, I don’t have the time or knowledge to tweak a hosting setup for these specialised requirements.

A quick look around and it was fairly evident what the solution for WPMayor’s hosting was: a WordPress managed-hosting solution. I needed someone to host my site, someone who I could rely on and who had experience working with WordPress and tweaking the hosting environment to be perfectly optimised for this CMS. Turns out there is a hosting company which provides just that, and everyone who works there is knowledgeable at WordPress + Hosting. Just perfect!

Specialized Managed WordPress Hosting: WP Engine or Kinsta

WP Engine and Kinsta are in my opinion the most reliable WordPress hosting solutions out there, with an equally reliable support staff who are always ready to help you out with any issue you might have.

If you have specialised requirements for your blog, or run a high-traffic blog, look no further because both WP Engine and Kinsta will give you all you need.

The cheapest plan at WP Engine, which caters for 1 site and up to 25,000 visits/month, is available at $35/month with a CDN included. This is especially great if your target audience is a global one.

If you want to host more than one site at WP Engine you can step up to the next package which will set you back $115/month but includes a CDN and hosting for up to 5 websites, with a maximum of 100,000 visits/month.

Since I have many websites that I manage or am involved with in some way, I get to use several good WordPress managed hosts. Several of my bigger sites are hosted on either Kinsta or WP Engine, so I took some notes that I will update as I go along on the experience with both of these highly ranked hosts.

Support

Ease of connecting to support is a hands-down win for Kinsta. With WP Engine, you have to select what’s the issue, then wait to get connected. It’s an older and cumbersome chat system when compared to Kinsta, which uses Intercom.

WP Engine staff are excellent at handling the basic questions, but might need to ask a higher-tier support person for more complicated questions. The chat system for Kinsta feels a bit more personal and the first level staff feels more knowledgeable to me. Nevertheless, both offer great support and this shouldn’t be something that sways you one way or the other.

Transactional emails

WP Engine – Password reset emails can be sent from our servers but these other emails would be considered bulk email use that you would need to setup a 3rd party email service for.

Backups

With Kinsta backups are taken every 6 hours or every hour.

Analytics

Kinsta has some cool analytics that WP Engine doesn’t provide. Not a deal-breaker but it’s cool to have that extra tool to play with.

Blog and Knowledgeable Base

Another clear win for Kinsta. They have an excellent blog and publish lots of performance-related content that’s not easily found on other WordPress blogs. The knowledge base seems to anticipate what I need. WP Engine’s is good, but Kinsta just seems to know exactly what I need, I guess I just prefer their style of content production.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

WP Engine allows custom URLs and Kinsta does not. WP Engine uses MaxCDN and Kinsta integrates with KeyCDN.

After testing jeangalea.com with both the Kinsta CDN and the Cloudflare CDN activated, I found that the combination doesn’t work very well. I tried using just the Kinsta CDN, and then switched to the Cloudflare CDN, with the latter proving to be clearly superior, perhaps also due to the other goodies that come with Cloudflare such as image optimization and file minimization.

I can highly recommend both WP Engine and Kinsta. They are very well managed companies who have been involved with WordPress for years, and your website will be safe with any one of them. Right now I would give the edge to Kinsta, unless you have low traffic, simple sites, in which case WP Engine will work out to be cheaper for you.

Over to You, Go Get Your Perfect Hosting Solution!

That’s my web hosting story with a happy ending. Nowadays I have my mind at rest hosting all my sites between WP Engine and Kinsta, and having them backed up via BlogVault. I’ve found this to be an absolutely fantastic setup that can be adopted by many of you out there, which prompted me to share my experience. Hope you can benefit from my experience.

Do you have any questions about hosting which I haven’t answered in this post? Please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.

It’s important that before you start you understand the concept of volumes on Synology Diskstations, because that’s the first thing you will need to set up before you set up Time Machine backups.

Volumes on the Synology Diskstation

You can use the Synology RAID calculator to help determine how you want to set up volumes. That being said, in this case you want to just make one, and then create shares to logically organize things.

The advantage to creating multiple volumes comes when you are using different size drives, want different levels of redundancy, or have significantly different uses .Let’s take an example a NAS with 4 x 6TBb drives. The only advantage you would gain would be less loss of data if an array fails, but at the cost of a higher risk of array failure.

[Read more…]

When you enable SSL on a Synology Diskstation, accessing it over the local network will throw up a selection of security warnings on browsers.

There are 3 choices here for the LAN user:

1. Ignore the warnings and click through
2. Register an Internet FQDN to your local IP
3. Create a self-signed SSL and root CA to sign the SSL

Choice 1 is the easiest but it gets annoying after a while. If you are using the NAS locally in your house only and you’re not making it available over the internet, you might as well disable SSL altogether as you won’t be getting much benefit out of it. If you’re the geeky type and want to do things the right way, however, keep reading.

Out of the three choices, choice 2 is the most proper way to do it if, especially if you’re making the NAS available over the internet. You will need a public domain name to so you can create a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for your Diskstation (something like https://ds.mydomain.com). Next you can generate a valid Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for the FQDN and configure DNS to point back to your local LAN and setup whatever routing is required.  This is best if you need to secure a local LAN asset where you do not control all devices accessing the Diskstation.

Choice 3 is in my opinion the best option for those who are only using the NAS locally.

It has two prerequisites:

• Your Diskstation must have a fixed IP address on your LAN.
• You must be able to add or assign certificates to devices you want to approve your SSL.

If you can satisfy those conditions, proceed with the following steps:

In DSM 6.0 -> Control Panel -> Security -> Certificate

Click “Add” to start the process and choose “Create self-signed certificate”

First you create a Certificate Authority (CA) which is the master key that will sign the site usable SSL.

You will need to supply the certificate details. What you fill in is not very important, you can use dummy data if you want.

Creating the self-signed certificate from the Synology control panel has a key step that you must complete or the certificate will be invalid.  The Subject Alternative Name (SAN) in the second step must contain BOTH the name of the Disktation on your network (“myDSname”) and its local fixed IP (192.168.1.10)

Once your certificate has been generated click “Configure” in DSM to set the new certificate to be the default for the system (The internal web server will restart) so that when you attempt to load the Diskstation site the correct SSL certificate will be presented to your browser.

Now you need to export the newly generated certificates from your Diskstation and import the root CA [and the SSL certificate] into your local machine’s certificate store so that they will be recognised as valid.

Check this page to understand how to install certificates system-wide as well as in specific browsers that handle their own certificates. It also includes details on installing the certificates on your mobile devices (iOS and Android).

Further resources: If you are making the NAS publicly accessibly over the internet, you can follow Mike Tabor’s guide on using Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates as they are completely free and work perfectly.

Two-factor authentication or 2FA is a way of making your logins more secure, by not only requiring a username and password when signing in, but also a special extra code that can either be received as an SMS or else generated by an app or device.

Most of you will already have used 2FA, perhaps without knowing so, when you log in to your internet banking. Most banks give out a 2FA device or card which stores some codes you are required to enter when logging in. This ensures that if someone guesses or cracks your password, they still won’t be able to login unless they are also successful in robbing your physical 2FA device.

I would use 2FA whenever it is possible, but I especially highly suggest using it on websites that contain sensitive information that can be used by a hacker to damage you or steal assets.

Here are a few popular sites to use 2FA on:

• • Social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc)
  • Crypto exchanges (Binance etc)
  • Amazon and other e-commerce sites that you use frequently.
  • Dropbox and similar platforms storing your files.
  • Email accounts (Gmail etc)

For a bigger list check out this site.

How to do 2FA

SMS is one of the most popular but least secure ways of doing 2FA, as sim swap attacks have become popular in recent years. It is highly encouraged to use an app or hardware device for 2FA when possible.

I like the Google Authenticator app and have used it for 2FA purposes. Another popular app is Authy, and it’s probably a better app than Google Authenticator in many ways, including the ability to use it on a desktop as well as being able to set it up on multiple devices.

There are also hardware devices that can be used for 2FA. Probably the most popular one is the Yubikey, while other competitors are Google Titan and Nitrokey.

If you are using the 1Password software, an even easier way to do 2FA is to replace Google Authenticator/Authy/Yubikey with 1Password itself. It has the ability to generate one-time passwords for 2FA purposes. If you wish, you can use both apps at the same time and see which one you like best, they will generate the same number so they are interchangeable.

Now it must be mentioned that using 1Password is less secure than using a hardware device or even an app like Authy or Google Authenticator. The reason is that if someone gets into possession of one of your devices and manages to enter your 1Password vaults using your main password (by guessing or other means of social hacking), they will not only have access to your usernames and passwords, but also to the 2FA codes. Then again, if you’re using a device for 2FA but you’re storing the backup words on 1Password, as many undoubtedly do, you will still run into this attack vector.

Here’s a website that serves as a guide to setting up 2FA on the most popular platforms and websites.