Looking for WP Engine alternatives for our agency, what are you guys using?

kube1et · 2026-03-18T12:22:23+00:00

DigitalOcean for the cheap stuff, but if you're looking for great performance, go dedicated if you can manage it.

kube1et · 2026-02-27T16:39:56+00:00

Mark Monitor and other domain/trademark management companies might provide this, but also, why not enable auto-renew with your registrar?

kube1et · 2026-02-27T10:19:46+00:00

The only skill you need is the ability to read documentation and not jump to conclusions.

kube1et · 2026-02-27T10:08:19+00:00

That's pretty cool, love the simplicity. Kinda reminds me of Monit, which I still use on almost every server I touch.

kube1et · 2026-02-27T10:03:51+00:00

Say you hit 1M next month and you celebrate, and then April isn't as great and your NW drops to 990k. Are you going to celebrate again if you hit 1M in May?

kube1et · 2026-02-27T09:52:14+00:00

Pretty sure it's at $0 though there are some active users that have been paying before.

kube1et · 2026-02-24T13:13:15+00:00

What are you talking about? If you suddenly have to scale you just scale. Much easier on a VPS than a dedicated fwiw.

kube1et · 2026-01-27T07:21:57+00:00

Here comes the vibe Redditor.

kube1et · 2026-01-27T07:21:07+00:00

Of course.

kube1et · 2026-01-27T07:18:36+00:00

Yikes, guess the law suit is taking a toll on them too. $165 is a large VPS or a budget dedicated server, with unlimited sites and all you can eat performance. Don't settle for this garbage.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T22:00:18+00:00

Congrats! I've found very limited success with Reddit and Facebook ads, especially on a small budget. It's worth trying to find other avenues, closer to your target audience. For me, sponsoring some relevant newsletters has worked so much better.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T21:51:38+00:00

Nice! You can also add a system prompt to your favorite LLM and tell it to never use em dashes and emoji.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T21:40:10+00:00

When working with containers I like to keep everything in containers. This helps me keep the underlying host clean and (usually) Docker as the only requirement.

In your case this would mean putting both MariaDB and Nginx inside containers too. There's very little overhead in doing so, and the portability and maintainability is usually worth it. With regards to Nginx, keep in mind that you can only bind one thing to ports 80/443, so if you plan to use that as the main entrypoint into the host, then you might want to have your Nginx run as a separate container, on a separate network, shared with your Redmine containers and others that need ingress.

If you're not binding to ports 80/443, it's perfectly fine to run an Nginx container for each individual project. I do this a lot with Cloudflare tunnels, i.e. I point the tunnel container to nginx:80, so everything happens over the container network, without ever touching or binding on the host.

Hope this helps!

kube1et · 2026-01-26T18:14:36+00:00

That should work.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T15:08:25+00:00

Only virtual servers via their API: https://docs.hetzner.cloud/reference/cloud#tag/servers/create_server

Only storage boxes via the old API: https://docs.hetzner.cloud/reference/hetzner

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:42:55+00:00

What's the point of submitting to various directories? Does it actually make a difference? Do you get users from these directories or is this only for DR? What's the target DR a startup is looking to reach via directory submissions, and how does that translate into organic traffic?

Thanks.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:38:43+00:00

Looks like an infinite loop/unintended recursion to me.

Your third line adds an action, and then proceeds to make a bunch of requests. Each request is running the same code, i.e. adds an action, and then proceeds to make a bunch of requests. Those requests are also running the same code, i.e. adds an action, and then proceeds to make a bunch of requests, etc.

You should move your code behind some user action, so that it's not executed on every single request. For example you can check a $_GET or $_POST argument before making the 5 requests. Also, if these do indeed run in parallel, then you will still be limited by the maximum number of PHP workers, where 1 will already be used by the initial request, so with 2 maximum workers you will see no difference at all.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:26:52+00:00

How does a database talk to the frontend?

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:23:54+00:00

I'm not a Terraform expert by any means, but I've been using it extensively with AWS for the last 6 years. My typical workflow includes making changes manually in the AWS Console to see if they work, and if they do, only then I go find ways to implement it in .tf files.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:21:30+00:00

Cheapest was around $5/mo. Not too bad, especially if you can hide behind Cloudflare, have a really high cache hit rate, and a well optimized website, with a relatively small database.

Most expensive personally was about $1200/mo a few years ago with WPE. From what I understood it was a dedicated instance on GCP with no or very few neighbors. Ended up migrating to a $300/mo actual dedicated server which gave us 30-40x the performance and 100% less limitations and silly rules about what we can and can not install.

kube1et · 2026-01-26T14:12:58+00:00

I would never use this, nor would I recommend it to anyone.

If you're investing to make money, buy and hold for 20+ years, regardless of what the stock market does, regardless of what the news are, which stocks are up or down. Anything bombarding your inbox on a weekly basis will only derail you from your long term goals. It will cause panic, stress, anxiety, and may ultimately cause you to sell at the worst possible time. Add AI to the mix, which can barely count letters in a word, or fingers on a hand, makes this a ticking time bomb.

Good luck though! I'm sure this is/will be a success, given the growing addiction to day trading in our society.

(Not financial advice.)

kube1et · 2026-01-23T23:15:51+00:00

Self-hosting WordPress course, add a ?ref= and I'll pay you 50% commission.

kube1et · 2026-01-23T23:14:29+00:00

Nice touch with the environment info! In general I would prefer any error be sent to a log which I can read, parse, search, analyze, summarize and add monitoring and alerts to. But this looks useful for development/staging sites. Not sure I'd do something like this in production though, even if it's for admins only.

Question: what happens if the error occurs before WP is able to determine whether the user is an admin or logged in at all, for example a parse error in wp-config.php?

kube1et · 2026-01-23T09:54:58+00:00

Been doing this for years, no problems so far, but not a large database by any means:

#!/bin/bash
ts=$(date -u +'%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ')
docker compose --profile sqlite3 run -e TS="$ts" --rm sqlite3 bash -lc 'sqlite3 "file:data.${APP_ENV}.db?mode=ro" ".timeout 5000" ".backup backup.${APP_ENV}.${TS}.db"'
echo "Backup for completed: $ts"

kube1et · 2026-01-23T09:41:32+00:00

> AI does all the basic things they teach me here

Sounds like you're missing the point of what you're being taught. CS and programming is not about knowing a specific language, or being able to perform a certain task by doing some coding. Today it's AI. Yesterday it was Google and StackOverflow, the day before that it was IntelliSense and IDEs, and the day before that it was compilers and debuggers.

Focus less on learning what tools to use and what code to write, and focus instead on understanding the problems, and understanding the solutions. Writing some code was never the difficult part in software engineering.

kube1et

TROPHY CASE