What to prepare for when self-hosting a WordPress website?
Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2025 5:39 am
With a few exceptions, we create websites in the WordPress content management system. Most of the time, the client decides to use our managed web hosting. Sometimes, however, they use their current web hosting provider (for example, because they have paid for years, or because of good experience, personal connections, etc.). When switching from other web solutions, some web administrators may encounter things that did not happen with the hosting of their websites before. They can be quite surprising. We therefore decided to point out the most common problems that a WordPress owner and their web administrator should prepare for. In this article, we also want to explain the difference between "web hosting" and "managed web hosting" . This is essential information that is important before deciding on a solution.
1) The new website is much more interesting… even for hackers
WordPress is a phenomenon – its technology is already used by tens of percent algeria phone number list of websites in the world (see our case study ). However, along with its popularity comes a minor problem – thanks to the possibility of automation, a new website on the WordPress platform will sooner or later fall into the crosshairs of hackers. Black-hat SEO “specialists” who want only one thing – to use your website as part of a web farm for backlinks (p*rno, v*agra and others), or directly to redirect traffic to other websites. It can work until you notice it, or until search engines like Google or Seznam index your website and you are left without traffic. Hackers were not very interested in the website that the client had before. Creating software to hack a WordPress solution (i.e. about a third of the Internet) is more interesting and economically efficient than trying to break the content management system of an unknown Czech website creator. The average time to hack an unupdated website was decades, now it is a few weeks. As they say, “ it’s not personal, they just care about the money ” .
So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
You have to update WordPress. But let's face it, no responsible webmaster can avoid updating any content management system. It is essential to update systems as technology advances over time. And it is moving really fast. The capabilities of WordPress and its development are also growing rapidly.
Make sure you have backups. Just because your current web hosting has been running for 10 years doesn't mean you don't need backups. You never know what might happen. Having a backup of your website is a pretty good protection for the investment you've made in your website.
You will need knowledge or support. The WordPress platform is great and you can do a lot of things yourself that you might have had to pay for. However, to operate the system, you will have to learn the basics of WordPress, or you need to have someone on hand to help you in case of problems. Just as Windows updates sometimes fail, WordPress website updates sometimes fail. And there is a big difference between a fan website and a corporate presentation where the owners send thousands of crowns of traffic every day.
2) Your website will now be much bigger
A typical client who has a new website created by us, for example, did not have a mobile version of the website . Even with the same amount of content, your new WordPress website will be physically much larger than before. The reason is that each image (for a product just inserted on the page) is generated on the web hosting for all possible resolutions. The total number of files depends on the graphic template you use, but it is not uncommon for a single image to have 20 different sizes . With 5,000 original images, the content will grow to 100,000 images. An add-on that caches the website (speeds it up by pre-computing pages or parts of them and saving them on disk as static files) can create additional tens of thousands of files. The size of an average website presentation in our country is from 1-5GB, so you can immediately forget about the cheapest web hosting (with a maximum of, for example, 1GB), which (with relatively bloated data WordPress) simply does not meet the requirements. Consider the fact that your web hosting needs to back up this data and you are on a multiple of this space (incremental backups around 10GB, full backups even 100GB per month for a larger website). That you have unlimited web hosting? But where
. Take a look here for example – the limit of more than 300,000 files is met by a whole number of our clients. Even unlimited web hosting is not completely unlimited, see below.
So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
Check your web hosting parameters and you may need to increase your tariff to ensure your website runs smoothly.
3) For the same money, your web hosting might be much slower
Our web hosting costs 399,- per month and is not the cheapest. This is due, among other things, to the fact that we do not limit users either in the number of files they can upload to the hosting or in the number of processes that the web hosting assigns to them. For the technically uninitiated - a process is a program that takes care of displaying 1 specific page of the website, or loading some of its parts (image, Javascript). Your new website is also usually responsive, more multimedia and simply more modern. This means, among other things, that several dozen files can be loaded simultaneously with the website (images, icons, logos, Javascript, custom fonts - fonts - etc.). For example, low-cost web hostings have unlimited everything, but they offer, for example, a maximum of 3-5 processes at a time (which is something that is often very carefully hidden in the terms and conditions). In other words, you can load (for example) 1 page, 2 images, 2 Javascript files at the same time, and the limit of 5 processes is exhausted. Assuming that your website loads in, for example, 2 seconds (and therefore uses all 5 processes for 2 seconds), you need to ask yourself what happens with such unlimited web hosting when:
2 users come to your website at once
or Google will join, which "crashes" and indexes large websites on a daily basis
Every second, a surprising user from Vietnam (Burma, China, Pakistan...) comes to the website and wants to log in to the website administration (and it is usually not the website owner on vacation)
you launch an advertising campaign on Facebook, and dozens of people suddenly arrive at the website
you will be scanned by one of the other approximately 4500 known robots that do nothing but crawl the web and load the capacity
The answer is simple – the more users (=people or robots) on the website at one time, the longer the last one to arrive will have to wait. In the case of very cheap hosting, it can be tens of seconds, or until the so-called timeout , when the user sees an error message instead of your website. This is especially true if you pay for traffic per click as part of a campaign. Take a look at the offers of typical web hosting companies (and other information) and answer for yourself what is the use of unlimited data web hosting when it can often serve a maximum of 1 person/robot at a time:
So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
Ideally, you need to be sure that only real people and "beneficial" robots (Googlebot, BingBot, SeznamBot, etc.) visit the website.
It is advisable to have a firewall implemented on the website (e.g. OWASP)
It requires at least occasionally actively monitoring and blocking accesses that are just trying to break into the website.
You need to check your web hosting conditions and increase the tariff if the number of processes is low (ideally 10+ processes at once so that the average website is not slowed down)
4) Sometimes you need to use other services to run your website
Modern websites often contain video or lots of multimedia content . For example, with videos, we have found that it is NOT SUITABLE to host them directly from your own web hosting. First, it takes up quite a lot of space (which you pay for) , but what is much more important is that the video does not have to load at all for visitors . The reason is that a full-resolution video is loaded in full resolution for all visitors right away. So, for example, with mobile tariffs, you significantly "eat up" data (which is still quite expensive). Secondly, not everyone has a 100Mbit connection and the video is not enough for visitors to load even before they leave the website. For videos, we use a paid tariff on Vimeo.com (from 8 USD per month), which adjusts the video according to the user's current internet speed. Why not Youtube? Because the video includes advertisements for competitors at the end. We can continue further - we use Amazon's CDN network for hosting images and scripts . All of these services are single-purpose and are much better for their purpose than typical web hosting.
1) The new website is much more interesting… even for hackers
WordPress is a phenomenon – its technology is already used by tens of percent algeria phone number list of websites in the world (see our case study ). However, along with its popularity comes a minor problem – thanks to the possibility of automation, a new website on the WordPress platform will sooner or later fall into the crosshairs of hackers. Black-hat SEO “specialists” who want only one thing – to use your website as part of a web farm for backlinks (p*rno, v*agra and others), or directly to redirect traffic to other websites. It can work until you notice it, or until search engines like Google or Seznam index your website and you are left without traffic. Hackers were not very interested in the website that the client had before. Creating software to hack a WordPress solution (i.e. about a third of the Internet) is more interesting and economically efficient than trying to break the content management system of an unknown Czech website creator. The average time to hack an unupdated website was decades, now it is a few weeks. As they say, “ it’s not personal, they just care about the money ” .
So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
You have to update WordPress. But let's face it, no responsible webmaster can avoid updating any content management system. It is essential to update systems as technology advances over time. And it is moving really fast. The capabilities of WordPress and its development are also growing rapidly.
Make sure you have backups. Just because your current web hosting has been running for 10 years doesn't mean you don't need backups. You never know what might happen. Having a backup of your website is a pretty good protection for the investment you've made in your website.
You will need knowledge or support. The WordPress platform is great and you can do a lot of things yourself that you might have had to pay for. However, to operate the system, you will have to learn the basics of WordPress, or you need to have someone on hand to help you in case of problems. Just as Windows updates sometimes fail, WordPress website updates sometimes fail. And there is a big difference between a fan website and a corporate presentation where the owners send thousands of crowns of traffic every day.
2) Your website will now be much bigger
A typical client who has a new website created by us, for example, did not have a mobile version of the website . Even with the same amount of content, your new WordPress website will be physically much larger than before. The reason is that each image (for a product just inserted on the page) is generated on the web hosting for all possible resolutions. The total number of files depends on the graphic template you use, but it is not uncommon for a single image to have 20 different sizes . With 5,000 original images, the content will grow to 100,000 images. An add-on that caches the website (speeds it up by pre-computing pages or parts of them and saving them on disk as static files) can create additional tens of thousands of files. The size of an average website presentation in our country is from 1-5GB, so you can immediately forget about the cheapest web hosting (with a maximum of, for example, 1GB), which (with relatively bloated data WordPress) simply does not meet the requirements. Consider the fact that your web hosting needs to back up this data and you are on a multiple of this space (incremental backups around 10GB, full backups even 100GB per month for a larger website). That you have unlimited web hosting? But where
. Take a look here for example – the limit of more than 300,000 files is met by a whole number of our clients. Even unlimited web hosting is not completely unlimited, see below.So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
Check your web hosting parameters and you may need to increase your tariff to ensure your website runs smoothly.
3) For the same money, your web hosting might be much slower
Our web hosting costs 399,- per month and is not the cheapest. This is due, among other things, to the fact that we do not limit users either in the number of files they can upload to the hosting or in the number of processes that the web hosting assigns to them. For the technically uninitiated - a process is a program that takes care of displaying 1 specific page of the website, or loading some of its parts (image, Javascript). Your new website is also usually responsive, more multimedia and simply more modern. This means, among other things, that several dozen files can be loaded simultaneously with the website (images, icons, logos, Javascript, custom fonts - fonts - etc.). For example, low-cost web hostings have unlimited everything, but they offer, for example, a maximum of 3-5 processes at a time (which is something that is often very carefully hidden in the terms and conditions). In other words, you can load (for example) 1 page, 2 images, 2 Javascript files at the same time, and the limit of 5 processes is exhausted. Assuming that your website loads in, for example, 2 seconds (and therefore uses all 5 processes for 2 seconds), you need to ask yourself what happens with such unlimited web hosting when:
2 users come to your website at once
or Google will join, which "crashes" and indexes large websites on a daily basis
Every second, a surprising user from Vietnam (Burma, China, Pakistan...) comes to the website and wants to log in to the website administration (and it is usually not the website owner on vacation)
you launch an advertising campaign on Facebook, and dozens of people suddenly arrive at the website
you will be scanned by one of the other approximately 4500 known robots that do nothing but crawl the web and load the capacity
The answer is simple – the more users (=people or robots) on the website at one time, the longer the last one to arrive will have to wait. In the case of very cheap hosting, it can be tens of seconds, or until the so-called timeout , when the user sees an error message instead of your website. This is especially true if you pay for traffic per click as part of a campaign. Take a look at the offers of typical web hosting companies (and other information) and answer for yourself what is the use of unlimited data web hosting when it can often serve a maximum of 1 person/robot at a time:
So what is the difference between the old and new solution?
Ideally, you need to be sure that only real people and "beneficial" robots (Googlebot, BingBot, SeznamBot, etc.) visit the website.
It is advisable to have a firewall implemented on the website (e.g. OWASP)
It requires at least occasionally actively monitoring and blocking accesses that are just trying to break into the website.
You need to check your web hosting conditions and increase the tariff if the number of processes is low (ideally 10+ processes at once so that the average website is not slowed down)
4) Sometimes you need to use other services to run your website
Modern websites often contain video or lots of multimedia content . For example, with videos, we have found that it is NOT SUITABLE to host them directly from your own web hosting. First, it takes up quite a lot of space (which you pay for) , but what is much more important is that the video does not have to load at all for visitors . The reason is that a full-resolution video is loaded in full resolution for all visitors right away. So, for example, with mobile tariffs, you significantly "eat up" data (which is still quite expensive). Secondly, not everyone has a 100Mbit connection and the video is not enough for visitors to load even before they leave the website. For videos, we use a paid tariff on Vimeo.com (from 8 USD per month), which adjusts the video according to the user's current internet speed. Why not Youtube? Because the video includes advertisements for competitors at the end. We can continue further - we use Amazon's CDN network for hosting images and scripts . All of these services are single-purpose and are much better for their purpose than typical web hosting.