If you haven’t heard about Fathom Analytics, then you should check them out. They’re a privacy-focused web analytics alternative to Google Analytics. I’ve been using them since 2018. Last July I upgraded to their paid service which is fully integrated into the Anchor Hosting dashboard. If you’re a customer, check out the Stats tab.…
I know we’ve all been there. Staring at the endless stream of new emails wondering, “Can I automate this somehow?”. Trust me, I know. That answer is always yes, it can be automated. However, the real question is whether it should be automated. Automating something takes time. It’s always a balancing act between whether…
When I switched my daily driver to Linux, one missing piece was how to handle local backups. I previously relied on Backblaze, which is an awesome application that provides real-time backups, Unfortunately Linux isn’t supported. After trying out various backup solutions I settled on using a command-line solution restic with a B2 bucket. It’s…
DevKinsta is a great way to run WordPress sites locally for testing or development purposes. With a few clicks, you can easily create a fresh WordPress site or pull down an existing site hosting with Kinsta. If you rely on your local development, like myself, then you’ll need to be sure your sites within…
Active WordPress sites can have a lot happening in the background. Background activity is controlled by WP-Cron. For improved performance, it’s recommended that WP-Cron be disabled and replaced with a system-level cron process. This makes low-traffic websites run better and significantly reduces the load for high-traffic websites. Kinsta has a great article explaining how…
Recently helped a customer remove Cloudfront URLs as part of a migration process from AWS to Kinsta. Kinsta’s CDN is powered by Cloudflare and is built-in. There is no need for URLs to reference a CDN-specific location. So restoring all URL references back to their original location was required before shutting down the old…
Whenever I take over web hosting I put the customer’s domain into my WHOIS tool. This gives a good overview of the current DNS, email provider, domain info, and host provider. The DNS crawling isn’t a complete picture of DNS records but good enough to capture the most important records. Most people know who…
Tis the season for holiday sales 🎄. Here at Anchor Hosting, you may have noticed the complete lack of discount sales or affiliate programs. Not even a black Friday announcement or mention of a potential coupon code. That is entirely intentional. I value my time and am not interested in playing growth games. I’d…
Certain types of WordPress websites are more demanding on the database than others. A growing database is a good way to uncover bad performant code. Tuning your PHP code for high performance is a complex topic and most likely involves working with theme and plugin authors for optimizations. Instead of doing all of that…
An optional service of Anchor Hosting is domain management. We’ll handle domain registration on your behalf. For most folks it’s easier to have everything, web hosting, and domains, all in one place. In fact to make it a non-decision the first domain is free with each hosting plan. Additional domains starting at $20 It’s…