One of the minor inconveniences in owning and managing your own web servers is knowing which operating system to use. There are a wide variety of open-source Linux distributions (or distros) available for your web server. SpinupWP recommends using either Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04, which are both LTS releases. If you do a bit…
By default, on a new WordPress install, minor versions of WordPress core are set to automatically update for you. However, major versions of WordPress core, plugins and themes are not set to update automatically. You can read more about automatic updates built into WordPress and configuration options here. SpinupWP automatically checks for updates to WordPress…
SpinupWP fully supports Git-based sites out-of-the-box, including support for Bedrock. We have our own git and Composer template, which is designed for SpinupWP. You can even configure push-to-deploy so that any code changes are automatically deployed to your server as they’re pushed to a Git provider like GitHub or Bitbucket. How It Works Whenever a Git…
Caching is king when it comes to WordPress performance. A well-optimized page cache like that of SpinupWP can unlock blazingly fast load times and handle hundreds of concurrent requests without breaking a sweat. However, not all sites can be page cached. Highly dynamic WordPress sites, such as community forums, often have page caching disabled. Similarly,…
Sometimes your WordPress site will show a blank white screen and nothing else. In the WordPress community, this is known as the WordPress White Screen of Death (WSOD) (a nod to the Blue Screen of Death when a Windows computer has a fatal system error). The White Screen of Death occurs when a request to…
There may come a time when you wish to move a site to a new server. Maybe a site has outgrown its current server, shared amongst several sites, and it’s time to move it to its own server. Or, your site is running on an outdated version of Ubuntu, and you’d like to migrate it…
One of the hardest parts of hosting WordPress sites yourself is trying to figure out why a site isn’t loading. There is an array of potential issues that could prevent a site from loading properly. We’re going to look at what causes some of these issues and how you might begin to investigate them. Server…
WP-Cron or WordPress cron is the system built into WordPress that handles the scheduling of time-based tasks. Out-of-the-box, WordPress performs a number of scheduled tasks, they include: WordPress core update checks Plugin update checks Theme update checks Publishing of scheduled posts Plugins can also utilize WP-Cron to schedule additional tasks, such as a backup plugin…
A UI to configure cron jobs right from the SpinupWP dashboard is on the roadmap, but if you are looking to add cron jobs for your sites right now, then here are the manual steps you need to take. Non-Root Cron Job If the scheduled command doesn’t need to be run as the root user, it…
If you SSH into an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server, you might see a message that encourages you to simply run a command to upgrade to 20.04 LTS: We strongly recommend against upgrading any server with a command like this for a few reasons. However, we can recommend the following options. Option 1: Start Fresh Instead of…
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