Last month while upgrading DNS providers, I've been working hard on something brand new. I'm introducing Anchor DNS which is available for all customers included with every plan. If DNS is not something your familiar with, it's not a problem, as we'll take care of any DNS updates for you. Simply email support@anchor.host. For the geeks,…
A premium DNS provider is often overlooked when running a website. My first experience with a premium DNS provider was back in 2014 when I switched to DNS Made Easy. With DNS Made Easy, I've never had a DNS related outage. The same cannot be said for other DNS providers during that same timespan. That alone…
Kinsta, a relatively new managed WordPress web host, has been consistently rolling out new features. While I’ve been impressed with their improvements, their production to staging deployment is a hassle to work with. Luckily this can be resolved with a custom WP-CLI script using WP-CLI over ssh. Kinsta’s dashboard can get you started Within…
Downloading and uploading lots of small files is never fun. It's much more efficient to first zip the files then move the .zip archive. Recently I need to grab some plugins from a large multisite installation. I only wanted to grab relevant plugins so I came up with the following javascript to assist with the plugin…
Today while going through my normal process I was about to reset one of my customer’s WordPress password and send over some billing instructions. As a WordPress administrator, updating someone else’s password via triggers an automatic email to that particular user. That email is generally unwanted as I’m already planning to communicate with the customer.…
Rclone is an amazing command line app for syncing files virtually anywhere. With recent added support for SFTP it's become a core part of my daily backup script. You can connect any number of remote storage systems. If you're only working with a few websites, then importing SFTP credentials isn't necessary as you can manually…
This past month I had a number of customers report that their website was running slow. This seemed to affect every web request, with some requests taking well over 4 seconds. I suspected a bad plugin was causing the bottleneck. Typically the first troubleshooting step is to create a staging site and deactivate plugins…
Over the last few months I’ve had privilege to be part of WP Engine’s SSH alpha SSH access is a big deal for WP Engine and for the entire managed WordPress hosting ecosystem. It’s currently under limited beta, however I do hope it’s released publicly soon. Using WP Engine’s SSH is similar to other…
Managed WordPress web hosts typically do nightly backups. That’s a great start however if something is important you should have multiple backups. My secondary backup method is a daily script which runs on a Backupsy VPS with lots of storage. There are two parts to the script. First an incremental sync download each WordPress…
Recently one of my customer’s WordPress sites was filled with random hidden span tags containing a single word: “Save.” The source is a mystery, however I suspect it came from bad code rather then something malicious. It was showing up at random spots throughout the website and causing some display issues. Manual removal was…