If you have read my post about WordPress hosting for personal and small business, I listed Lightning Base with its Personal plan for only $9.95/month. After recommending it to a couple of clients, I am impressed with it as it is fast and running cPanel which I am very familiar with. It would be the finest choice with my requirements.

Amazon EC2

Then I got my eyes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is basically a scalable cloud-based instance where you can increase or decrease its capacity almost instantly. Just like any other cloud based hosting provided. Its lowest instance t2.micro is priced at around $9.52/month and comes with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM. More than enough for my needs at the moment. The wonderful thing is, AWS offers a [Free Tier] program where new customers can get started with Amazon EC2 for free for one year.

There was only one thing that held me back: like all other cloud based hosting services, EC2 requires deep knowledge of server (Linux) command line to set up everything. Of course AWS provides an extensive tutorial in how to set up WordPress on an EC2 instance, but it was still too much in my opinion since I needed something more practical.

Bitnami Cloud Hosting

The answer came in the form of Bitnami. It is an open source project that offers open source installers or software packages for web applications and development stacks. Over 100 open source application stacks are ready to use, including ever popular WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and more coming soon. I had known about Bitnami for a while, but I had not noticed about its Cloud Hosting product which was released in February 2010.

With Bitnami Cloud Hosting, you can monitor all your cloud servers and applications from one dashboard. Imagine being able to set up new WordPress blog on Amazon EC2 with a few clicks and less than 30 minutes. What is even greater, it comes with a free Developer Plan for one server (application).

Two essential components offered for free, no reason to hold me back from migrating my WordPress installation. The process went well, now I am ready to share with you the steps to set up yours.

Step 1: Create AWS Account

Just to be clear, EC2 is only one of dozens of AWS products and services. The AWS Free Tier program is free for 18 products/services within the limits defined by them. For EC2, you can run 750 hours (31 days = 744 hours) of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro instance usage per month.

Creating an AWS account is as simple as it can be. You just enter your personal data such as email, name, address and phone number. Note that you will need to enter a valid credit card information, but if you set everything right, you will not pay a dime until the following year. One next important step is automated phone validation but you only need to follow the on screen instructions and is very straightforward.

Step 2: Create Bitnami Cloud Hosting Account

This is much more simple and like most great web apps, creating an account is only a matter of minutes. You only need to enter basic data such as name, email and password. Click the link from the confirmation email, then you are all set. No credit card required until you need to add a second server/app.

Step 3: Add AWS as Bitnami Cloud Instance

We are now starting the fun part. First, you need to add your AWS account into Bitnami Cloud Hosting panel. Everything works through AWS’s API through its Access Key:

1. Login to AWS Management Console
2. From the console dashboard, click on your name on the top right and select Security Credentials
   
3. On “Your Security Credentials” page, click on Access Keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) and then Create New Acess Key
4. New Access Key ID and Secret Access Key strings will be automatically generated and displayed on your screen, copy and save it; you can also download the key file
   

You are done from AWS side, next you need to share the access to Bitnami:

1. Login to Bitnami Hosting
2. From the left navigation, click on Clouds
3. Under “Manage Cloud Accounts”, click New
4. Enter the name and default location of your preference, for AWS Credentials enter the key strings generated from AWS then click Save

Bitnami Hosting now acts as the control panel of AWS and you can install application stacks on AWS through it.

Step 4: Spin WordPress from Bitnami Cloud

Next, let’s roll WordPress on AWS EC2 instance.

1. From Bitnami’s panel, click Servers on the left navigation
2. Under “Server Management”, click New and on the pop-up box select Launch Regular Server
3. The next step involves selecting options:
   • Name: your server/application name, ie. “My Blog”
   • Domain Name: for every server you run on Bitnami, you need to create a subdomain under .bitnamiapp.com; you will be able to assign your own domain later
   • Application Options: enter admin login details and under Email Configuration you may also want to add your Gmail or Custom SMTP details
   • Development Options: the default components are enough, but I added Memcached and Varnish
   • Add New Application: click the button, search and tick on WordPress
   • Operating System: I just selected Ubuntu Linux (hvm) 64-bit
   • Server Type: T2 Micro
   • Disk Size: I just use 10GB, but AWS Free Tier allows you to use up to 30GB
   • Cloud Account: your AWS account name from step 2
   • Server Location: select from your preferred location, remember though that different location has different pricing after your Free Tier period expires
   • IP Address: you can select Dynamic IP or Static IP, I chose the latter
     
4. You can ignore the “Estimated Amazon charges” table because it is only Bitnami’s dynamic cost caculator; Amazon will not charge you if you only select the components within their Free Tier range
5. Click Build and Launch

Now you just sit and wait for a few minutes for Bitnami to take care of things for you.

Step 5: Complete Your WordPress Site Installation

When your EC2 and WordPress installation is ready, you will receive an email from Bitnami. You can go into Bitnami Hosting panel and see your server under Servers. To customize or gain more information, click on the server name (eg. “My Blog”) and click Manage.

Some important items you may need to look at:

1. Under Properties tab
   1. IP Address – this is the static or dynamic IP assigned to your server, you will need to enter the IP address on your DNS to point your domain to your server
   2. Application Credentials – if you did not assign a password of your application, it was automatically generated and can be retrieved here
2. Under Applications tab, you want to change the address to your domain instead of a prefix under bitnamiapp.com subdomain; this will automatically linked to WordPress General Settings

Once you have updated your DNS to the IP of your WordPress installation and it has propagated, your site is ready and you can use it as you would install it from any server.

Additional Step: Optimize WordPress Installation

Out of the box, WordPress stack prepared by Bitnami is already good. Your website or blog will load blazingly fast. To some, including myself, it may not be enough though and you may want to make it even better. In that case, you want to read Bitnami’s excellent wiki page in how to optimize default WordPress install.

There you go. Free WordPress hosting for one year on a terrific cloud instance with less than an hour to set up. Do keep in mind that EC2’s t2.micro is probably ideal only if you have an average of few hundred up to low thousand page views per day. Above that, you may need to use their better instances although those are not eligible for AWS Free Tier program. If your blog is that popular, please be generous with your hosting budget.

The post Set up free WordPress hosting using Amazon EC2 and Bitnami Cloud appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

There are tons of WordPress plugins out there and for different purposes. Most are designed to add new features or integrations with other services, some to make it looks nicer, and so on. Below I am going to list a number of plugins that will help to increase your SEO score.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

What does it do?
A lot. This is the top plugin in the category, not only to improve your blog’s SEO, but also to expand your understanding about SEO. Its one of the most important features is that you will be able to set different meta title and description which will be displayed on the search engine results. It also helps you in reviewing the content of you post with a targeted keyword or keyphrase.

Why does it matter?
Basic SEO practices encourage you to optimize your meta information to help search engines to display a more relevant preview of the page they are crawling. That aside, if you follow all other tools available from this great plugin, you are already improving your blog SEO a few levels.

Go to WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin Page

W3 Total Cache

What does it do?
It helps improving your blog performance through many methods without actually having you to move to a bigger hosting. At its heart is the caching tools that will reduce the time and resources to generate your web pages.

Why does it matter?
Search engines love sites that load fast. Reducing your page load will certainly increase your SEO score.

Go to W3 Total Cache Plugin Page

Akismet

What does it do?
Coming from the same company who brought us WordPress itself, Akismet is a web service that checks comments made on your blog for spam.

Why does it matter?
The biggest reason people or bots are spamming on people’s blogs to get backlinks to their sites, which mostly are shady. Getting spam comments on your blog means having backlinks to questionable websites and URLs, which search engines do not like. By freeing your blog, or at least reducing the number of spam comments, your blog will look more legitimate.

Go to Akismet Plugin Page

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

What does it do?
As the name says, this plugin allows WordPress to automatically generate related posts to the one your visitors are reading. There are lots of similar plugins of course, but YARPP is most of the most popular.

Why does it matter?
Placing internal links to other posts helps search engines to index other pages on your blog and a suggested SEO practice.

Go to Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) Plugin Page

Google XML Sitemaps

What does it do?
It can automatically generate XML sitemap of your blog. It offers quite extensive settings so you can select categories to be excluded, post types and so on. Note that WordPress SEO by Yoast has this feature built-in and just as good, but in case for some reason you do not want to install that, then this one is a must.

Why does it matter?
XML sitemap is the ‘map’ for search engines to crawl the information your blog. Have it constantly updated, then you will be sure to have all your pages and posts indexed.

Go to Google XML Sitemaps Plugin Page

There are probably still dozens of other plugins that can push your SEO quality and I only share ones I use and can recommend. Feel free to share your favorites by posting your comments below.

The post WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Blog SEO appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting and Why You Might Need It

I say ‘might’ because you practically can install WordPress in almost any web hosting plan, that is the beauty of WordPress and one of the reasons that has made it so popular. There are a number of advantages by choosing hosting services that are customized only for WordPress. I am going to narrow them down to the top 3 reasons:

• Support. Most web hosting services do not offer support for the applications you install on their servers. Typically, your developers are responsible to enable the website or application they are developing to be able to run on the production server. Managed WordPress hostings however, have WP experts as part of their support team so they will be able to assist customers that are experiencing issues with their WP sites.
• Speed. Like any PHP CMS or application, WordPress with huge database or bloated plugins can easily exhaust the server resources and eventually add the load times. Managed WordPress hosting servers have been configured and optimized to handle these and should reduce the page load time significantly.
• Security. As the most popular PHP application, WordPress is always a tempting target to hackers and malicious scripts. While you are always responsible for the security of your own blog/site, WP hosting will be an added layer of security with by constantly monitoring your code’s health including automatic WP updates.

Budget

Specialized service comes with a more premium price, understandable because it is targeting a niche market. If you are looking for a typical $5/month hosting, then you are probably better to choose a generic shared hosting plan.

However my research goal is to offer options of managed WordPress hosting plans for personal or small business use with maximum monthly price plan of $30. Above that, unless you are making money directly from your website or it generates thousands of visitors per day, it may not be worth it in my humble opinion.

WordPress Hosting Plans Comparison

Which One to Choose?

Managed WordPress hosting has become a promising business with many companies jumping in even though the market is quite limited. Price will be the biggest factor in making a decision to switch your server or selecting one for a new project.

WPEngine was probably the first and is still one of the best option you have out there, unfortunately it is also the most expensive. Its Personal plan has limited options with no dedicated IP and SSL support.

On the other end, there is Lightning Base. While it is a relatively new name, at least to my ears, their Personal plan offer is very interesting and has most of the options I need for hosting an e-commerce WordPress projects while keeping the server budget reasonable.

Do you have other hosting suggestions? Please post your comments below.

Additional Note

Please keep in mind that choosing the best provider is only one part of getting the best performance out of your WordPress installation. Before considering to switch to another hosting, you might want to consider optimizing your WordPress site. This post is a good reference to start.

The post Best Managed WordPress Hosting for Personal and Small Business appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

http://yoursiteurl.com/wp-admin/options.php
Look for image_default_link_type and change its value to ‘none’

Option 2: From Theme’s functions.php

Add this line: update_option('image_default_link_type','none');

The post WordPress: Inserting Image with Link Default to None appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.