I recently completed a DNA test and one surprise was that some 3% of my strands are of Scottish origin. This is slightly more than the average 2% Neanderthal genes present in modern populations (1).
I mention this 3% simply to justify, or at least explain, my natural frugal nature. This nature was tested in the last two months after undertaking a migration from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 and then being horrified to discover that the hosting price had nearly doubled. And so I began to look for less expensive alternatives.
My first decision was to use WordPress. After setting up a development environment (2) on my home machine — Apache, MySQL, PHP, and WordPress — I worked through setting up a template and migrating, yet again, my content.
After reaching a point where I was satisfied with the results, I then looked for a hosting platform. Many were assessed, and often they were no less expensive than Squarespace. I was ready to go with AWS LightSail until it became apparent it was locked into using PHP 8.2 but as one of my plugins supported only 8.0, I had to abandon this option.
I finally landed on DreamHost, which costs just a bit more than AWS, but importantly, offers support, which so far has been quite good.
I expect there will be some more fiddling with the site, but I think that will be part of the fun.
(1) Neanderthal Genetics, Wikipedia
(2) MAMP — Your local web development solution
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