I had a reseller (WHM/cPanel) account at HostGator for years, and moved everything over to a VPS last fall, including about a dozen WP sites. 

I had occasional issues at HG, but an endless stream of nightmares on the VPS.

What I discovered is that shared hosting providers put stuff in place to help screen out the majority of problems.

Running a VPS is pretty much like running your own dedicated server — the security stuff is 100% up to you!

After about 6 months of non-stop headaches caused by security holes in my WP sites, I moved everything back to a reseller account (WHM/cPanel) at Namecheap. 

It’s like night and day.

If you’re going to host it on your own server or a VPS, be prepared to run one or two security plugins, as well as tighten down your email to prevent hackers from accessing it via WP holes.

As an aside, the people who write the plugins, and especially the free ones, don’t really know how to deal with things like SQL Injection, XSS, and stuff like that. Anything that collects data via fields is subject to attack as well. And nobody tests for or reports on bugs that may exist in the stuff on Wordpress.org (or commercial stuff either, for that matter) — their main concern is basic operational bugs and compatibility with prior WP versions. Even the themes can be a source of attacks.

It’s not that I’m down on WP; rather, it’s that I’ve learned there’s actually some considerable value in hosting WP on even a cheap hosting account because of the security services the hosting provider will already have in place. (They do it, I imagine, just for their own sanity!)

-David Schwartz



On May 18, 2016, at 6:18 PM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:

My daughter has become a blogger of late (http://www.sustainablesixty.com/)...I guess a recently minted BS from ASU needs a summer hobby while she works and saves up her money to start her MS in the Fall at ASU.

I was thinking of hosting her Wordpress blog on some spare space I have on a Linode machine, saving me the cost of paying to host her site. Does anyone on the list support Wordpress, and if so, any suggestions or gotchas about hosting Wordpress?

Thanks!

Mark
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