Category
41 posts
Shared hosting and VPS plans now cost the same — what differs is the ops burden. A frank look at noisy neighbors, daemon limits, the 2am-outage problem, and where panels like Ploi fit.
A command-by-command walkthrough for hosting a CMS on a $5/month VPS: server hardening, the Nginx + PHP 8.3 stack, SQLite vs MySQL, free SSL, cron, and rclone backups.
An honest developer's comparison of SQLite and MySQL as the database under a CMS. Covers WAL mode, write concurrency, backups, benchmarks, and a decision table by site type.
An honest, no-horse-in-the-race comparison of Statamic and WordPress in 2026: architecture, templating, plugins, security, licensing, and hosting, with a verdict for each use case.
WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress are different products, and many site owners don't know which one they're on. This guide explains the difference, why people leave, and the two migration paths out.
A practical guide to migrating a Ghost blog to a self-hosted CMS: what's in the export, how to map posts/tags/authors, redirect and subscriber handoff strategy, and why paid newsletter businesses should probably stay on Ghost.
A practical guide to leaving Squarespace for a self-hosted CMS: what the XML export covers (and misses), a 10-step migration plan, 301 redirect strategy, and a Squarespace vs self-hosted cost table.
A fair, developer-to-developer comparison of seven Ghost alternatives in 2026 — UnfoldCMS, WordPress, Substack, beehiiv, Hugo, Statamic, and Micro.blog — with a pricing/hosting table and an honest case for when Ghost is still the best choice.
An honest developer-to-developer comparison of flat-file CMS (Grav, Kirby, Statamic) and database CMS (WordPress, UnfoldCMS, Ghost) across versioning, querying, editing, and hosting — with a 5-step checklist to pick the right one.
The agency case for shadcn-based CMSs. Per-client themes from one codebase via Tailwind v4 CSS variables. Plugin-bloat eliminated. Flat licensing vs per-site SaaS. Real 3-year cost math for 10 client sites.
Agency picker for managing 5-50 client sites in 2026. WordPress Multisite vs separate installs vs modern self-hosted CMS. Real ops cost over 5 years, plugin patching labour math, when migration pays back.
Strapi is a serious CMS until the Node deployment ops surface (PM2, Docker, DB tuning, security patches) becomes the bottleneck. Honest migration paths to UnfoldCMS, Payload, Sanity, or flat-file. When to leave, when to stay, real cost math.