I have decided to upgrade my website for my Week of Hustle!
In addition the new domain name is now deyson.com instead of deysonortiz.com.
On top of that I have decided to move to a new web hosting company.
The old web hosting company I have used for the past 3 years was site5.com. They did great work, professional and they were very solid. But, I have found another hosting company called WPengine.com that provides more specialized WordPress support and has some amazing features that makes my web work and life easier.
I found out about WPengine.com through word of mouth and I heard nothing but great things. They also only host WordPress sites, so if there is a WordPress related question they are very quick to help.
I have also used WPengine.com for close to half a year with my store’s website http://motion-master-templates.com and a client’s website http://theitravelchannel.tv and have been very happy with them.
A feature I love is the staging area. This genius idea creates a staging site or a what I call a test site with a simple click of a button. So once the live site is ready just click on “Copy Live to Staging” button and this will create an exact clone of the live site with a staging sub domain. Use the test site to test themes, styles, plugins and features to our heart’s content without the fear of doing any harm to our live site. Once happy with the results and everything works just click on the “Copy Staging to Live” button.
There is also their daily backup option which is nice to have because we can make backup points when we want and we can restore our backup points as well with a click of two buttons. This feature has been very valuable to me as I admit that I am human and I do make mistakes. In the past I had to ask a restore and that could be a slow down.
Wpengine.com cost is higher than Site5.com but it has been worth every penny as they have many other premium features included. I also found a coupon code for a huge discount. “Google: WPENGINE.com coupon code”
One note though is that all WPEngine does is WordPress hosting. So we are responsible for email service and the one I recommend is www.hover.com. They do email service and domain registration. Very simple to sign up and I like how they do not try to up sell all the time like other companies. One big benefit from having your site hosting and email service separate is that if the site is down we can still get our email and vice versa, although this has been very rare it is nice to know.
The theme for this website has changed to the Basis Theme from Theme Foundry. This company also made the Twenty Twelve theme which was the default theme for WordPress during the year 2012 and I have used it since. Theme Foundry’s themes are very clean, minimalist and load fast. I have worked with the company in the past and I know their support is top-notch and their code is clean and easy to use.
The new work portfolio for this site will automatically use the larger images for the two most recent portfolio items and older items will use the smaller images. However I may change this so all the images are large. This is something I am working on with the use of Justin Tadlock’s plugin Custom Content Portfolio. It is still under construction so please do not mind the dust.
I began a blog post to keep my progress and hopefully I can help shave a few hours of work off your day. I will keep you updated and please let me know your thoughts. Thank you for your time and have an amazing day! 🙂