Database Backups with DevKinsta

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…

Recommended Cron with WordPress Multisite

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…

Removing Cloudfront URLs with Regex

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…

Reverse Lookup a WordPress Web Hosting

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…

No Discounts, No Affiliates and No Black Friday Deals

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…

Cleaning a Large WordPress Database

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…

Sharing Domain Access with Anchor Hosting

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…

Automating WordPress backends with Chrome and PHP

If you’ve ever used ManageWP then you know their onboarding is quite magical. With only three pieces of information, the WordPress site url, username and password, ManageWP will automatically install and configure their worker plugin. That allows your site to be fully managed by ManageWP. ManageWP isn’t open source so I have no idea…

Enabling IPv6 with Kinsta’s Cloudflare Integration

Officially, Kinsta doesn’t support IPv6. In fact I’m not aware of any managed WordPress host provider advertising IPv6 as a feature. Out of the popular WordPress hosts like Kinsta, Liquid Web, Pagely, Pressable, Siteground or WP Engine, only Liquid Web has their own homepage running on IPv6. I get it. IPv6 is one of…

Migrating a WordPress Site When All Options Fail

Moving a WordPress site from one server to another is a fairly straightforward process. Start by getting a copy of the WordPress files, specifically the wp-content folder, and a fresh database export. Import the files and database to the new server and then configure your domain with the new web server IP. Deploy fresh…