A little background on me, Jon Dingman, and WordPress hosting. I have been building websites since 1999 and I started self-hosting with WordPress in 2004. I have used everything from shared hosting, dedicated hosting, a VPS, managed services, you name it, I have tried it.

In the most recent years, I have been self-hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraging WordOps and a cluster methodology. And for most of the time, it was working great.

However, more recently, the business needs changed, so the hosting needed to change.

I have been using WordOps for quite some time, and have been quite happy with it. It has its pros and cons like any software does, but I always like to explore what else is out there to be able to compare.

I started looking into other solutions and found SlickStack seemed to be a comparable alternative to WordOps.

My Experience with SlickStack

I ran the install process for SlickStack and found it to be a bit cumbersome, even just getting the configuration in place. I had to delete and start fresh, numerous times on my DigitalOcean droplet.

After about 5 attempts to get it installed, I was finally able to get it installed, configured, and up and running.

I quickly learned though, it was not a straight forward process to install custom extensions into PHP-FPM or Nginx.

This issue, along with primary feature of it that it only supports a single site, led me to go back to WordOps.

Back to WordOps

So back to WordOps I went. An easy install and I was up and running in very little time.

I enjoy the time I get to personally invest in trying out new solutions, new hosting providers, and seeing what others may be coming up with along the way. It also helps me as a Product Manager, to continue testing out “competing” products to see what someone else might be doing better or worse.

All in all, I’m a big fan of WordOps and glad it’s continuing to be developed.

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comments.