What’s this about the release of DreamPress 2? Dreamhost’s managed WordPress environment recently got revved with some cool features. Files are now stored and served up from speedy SSD drives. Automatic daily backups appear to be newly added, and of course, there’s all the other performance enhancing features that got even better.
Nice. Very nice.
Notice anything different around here? Actually, Pulpconnection has been different since the end of August, but I just didn’t have the focus to summarize the changes. So on a quiet Sunday morning with a cup of Nespresso, I’m motivated to list the changes.
First and foremost, you’ll notice the new look of Pulpconnection. For years, I’ve used the Thesis theme then added the Chronicl look. This was a fun, playful combination.
While I’ve been a fan of the Thesis theme since 2009, I wanted a fresh new look. Thesis is still awesome, but I didn’t want to spend the time building my own look using Thesis 2. So while wandering around the web, I came across On Topic by WooThemes. What struck me about On Topics was its “bigness.” Everything looks so big and easy to see. This readability aspect was the biggest motivator to switch. I love my blogging bling, but all those widgets become distractions. I still have them, but they’re on the bottom of the page leaving you the readers a less cluttered view.
Along with widgets only in the footer, On Topic features a header that moves. On the home page, the “header” is vertical, but on posts and pages, the header goes horizontal, allowing for more space for content.
Customization of On Topic is available though much more limited that with Thesis. Thesis still provides way more options to customize aspects of your WordPress site. I’ll miss that about Thesis. WooThemes includes lots of Google fonts with On Topic though I’ve seen strange characters suddenly appear. Not sure what or why.
I also changed Pulpconnection’s home page to show excerpts of blog posts instead of full posts like before. I like the way On Topic displays its excerpts with the featured image. Sorry, you need to click on the Continue Reading button to see the full post.
I’ve changed up some of the menus since On Topic has less options for menus than Chronicl. I spent some time and filled out my Travels section including more trips from the past. I also started adding my annual Kicks Analysis series. The most interesting addition is in the Around Hawaii menu. Click on that to see a map of Hawaii along with geo-tagged Pulpconnection posts.
Yes, Pulpconnection now has one. See that 16×16 pixel image of oranges in your browser bar? That’s the favicon for Pulpconnection created with the Favicon Generator. The green limes weren’t recognizable in a favicon size so oranges it is.
Like I already mentioned, Pulpconnection is now using Dreamhost’s DreamPress managed service. For its price, I don’t how you can compete with a VPS. I could never afford the 1.5+ GB of memory consumed by this site.
To compound all the changes, WordPress 4 coincidentally released while all the above was going on. So why not make things harder? Yup, upgraded to WordPress 4.
As always, there are things to do. DreamPress includes Varnish, but I understand the simultaneous use of a caching plugin and Cloudflare is possible. Not sure if using all of these makes sense, so I’ll take this slow.
Lastly, I started looking into email subscription services. I haven’t made a choice yet since they’re different. WordPress’ JetPack includes an email subscription widget (which is in the footer) yet it doesn’t provide a simple URL link to sign up with. The venerable Feedburner has had email subscriptions forever and provides a link. Then there’s Tiny Letter. It’s like neither JetPack or Feedburner, allowing for email newsletters unrelated to blog posts. I’m gonna drag my feet on this one, trying to figure out the best pulpy answer.
And there we have all the changes making the new look of pulp.
There, it’s done. Pulpconnection is back, and this time it’s running on Dreamhost’s managed WordPress service called DreamPress. Over the years, I went from a shared server to a virtual private server (VPS) that gave me more control but meant that I had to exert more control. That’s good and bad. There were times when things went haywire, and I didn’t know why. Of course, craziness could still happen with DreamPress, but at least, there’s dedicated support and more importantly a scalable platform. Instead of me allocating more memory to servers, DreamPress does the magic. How I don’t know. Like I said, magic.
The cost too of DreamPress is hard to argue. Right now, DreamPress is discounted to $20 a month. Try squeezing in enough memory allocation on a VPS for $20 a month. Doesn’t get you much. So by switching to DreamPress, I can reduce my VPS resources significantly for my other projects, more than $20 a month.
There’s more to learn about DreamPress, but overall I think there’s less to know like fine tuning WP installs and optimizing WP. The biggest learning curve for DreamPress is actually getting DreamPress to work for Pulpconnection. Dreamhost has an automated feature that converts existing “one-click” WordPress installs to DreamPress. Unfortunately for me, Pulpconnection wasn’t a one-click install or maybe it was back in the day but doesn’t now qualify as “one-click.” So what does that mean? A manual transfer to DreamPress.
For this Mac user, working via the command line is a frightening endeavor. Fortunately, there are good instructions, specifically this Migrating to DreamPress post. Read it and reread it. It’s all there. Okay, I noticed one or two minor changes, but they weren’t show stoppers. The scp secure copy created an extra subdirectory for the copied files but that was fixed with the Move to Parent feature in Panic’s Transmit.
The other scare was importing the Pulpconnection SQL database backup. From PHPMyAdmin, I found the Import tool, but the database was simply too large for the max import size. Dreamhost chat tech support came through by directing me to import through the shell. I had to literally write out the command line on paper to make sure I had all the parameters correct. Less than a minute later, the SQL import was silently done.
So here we are. Hopefully, less technical headaches and notifications that Pulpconnection servers had to restart for whatever reason. And definitely less stress for me. 🙂
Dreamhost just announced their new high-revving WordPress hosting service called DreamPress. Sounds like a “dream” come true if you’ve been maintaining your own WordPress install and balancing its resources and performance against cost. DreamPress seems to hit the right price point but initially, the cost is per site. I wish it were for several sites, well, at least more than one at the same price.
But I am confused about the overall pricing. I joined Dreamhost ages ago using a special promotion. Over the years, I changed to VPS, upped my server’s memory, added CloudFlare, and more. Most of the changes incurred additional costs which I think I could dump if I signed up for DreamPress. But I’m not certain if that’s “allowed” for the DreamPress pricing.
Anyways, DreamPress is an attractive option if a few more concessions are made. I gotta keep watching this…