Whenever I’ve felt like using WordPress, I would spin up a new pre-built DigitalOcean instance and that has always worked fine. I’m mostly capable of managing servers and dealing with issues and patches and such, so running my own WordPress instance isn’t a big deal.

This morning, though, was different. I was figuring out why image metadata wasn’t being included in resized images. I assumed it had to do with the GD library I thought WordPress used by default, so I went in to check on ImageMagick’s status. Sure enough, the WordPress “Site Health” area of the control panel claimed that PHP’s Imagick module wasn’t installed.

First off, why? I could’ve sworn it always had been before, but perhaps not. Should be easy enough, especially with DigitalOcean’s usually thorough documentation.

Long story short, installing ImageMagick and installing/enabling the PHP module was easy enough after some Googling. Except it didn’t work. The control panel still claimed that the module was missing. It wasn’t long before I got into the “start throwing things at the wall and see what sticks” mode of server management, so I decided it might be better to pay someone to manage things for me.

There are a few highly-regarded outfits offering managed WordPress hosting. I basically flipped a coin and signed up for SiteGround.

Migrating the site using their migration plugin took about 15 minutes. A quick DNS change and I was running on the new platform with nary a glitch1. Speed seems acceptable. I enabled Imagick in PHP via their control panel and I’m off and running.

A year of hosting cost me $36. That’s less than three months of Digital Ocean’s instance, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Sometimes it’s nice taking the easy route.

  1. I did have to manually request an SSL cert (from Let’s Encrypt) via the SG control panel, though. ↩︎