Just over three years ago, I opened a Reseller web hosting account with Hostgator. A three-year plan was quite reasonable at the introductory price, but three years later, with a renewal at the standard price of around $1200 bucks looming, I started feeling pressured to get out of there.

Hostgator seems to be considered an evil company around the internet, something to do with their eviler parent conglomerate company, Endurance International Group (EIG). Personally, I found Hostgator to have excellent customer service. They fixed every problem and answered every question I threw at them. Their hosting fees are well-earned. A reseller hosting server with WHM and WHMCS is a complex configuration challenge for a newbie. I make sure I’m completely stumped before consulting tech support, but I imagine many of their customers don’t hesitate to take out their frustration on support people.

A couple of months before the August renewal date, I got serious about nailing down an alternate hosting situation for my few WordPress and HTML websites. I knew Google and Amazon had some sorts of cloud virtual machine kinds of services, but my understanding was quite fuzzy and I didn’t know if those services were something I could use. I spent a couple of hours watching and following along with a very long YouTube video about setting up a website using AWS. I finally decided I was in over my head on this platform considering I didn’t have much time. A couple of days later, I heard about AWS Lightsail.

It’s a much more straightforward virtual machine configuration than the other AWS services. Many users can choose an instance with the software they need already installed – it’s a quick way to launch a website quite inexpensively. In my case, I wanted to host multiple websites and I saw that Lightsail offered an instance of Linux with a LAMP stack ready to roll.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the term LAMP, it stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL server, and PHP – everything you need to serve up one or many WordPress (or other web applications) and HTML websites. It was just what I needed.

I’ve used a WAMP stack locally on my laptop (WAMP: replace the ‘L’ for Linux with a ‘W’ for Windows) so I wasn’t starting totally from scratch, but this LAMP instance ran on a Bitnami distribution of Linux, and it seemed to be a bit non-standard when all my googling about LAMP configuration seemed to land on info about Ubuntu Linux distributions. And certain things seemed janky – certbot LetsEncrypt certificates wouldn’t easily renew as advertised elsewhere, and I’d been reading that updating PHP was not so easy (although, at some point my 7.2 php mysteriously changed to 7.4.2). After a few days, I decided to try a different approach.

I was able to leave my mostly-configured Bitnami/LAMP instance in place, and start a new instance with the Ubuntu 20.04 ‘OS only’ instance. I installed LAMP myself, which wasn’t a huge deal at all. The hard part of that process is not installing the components, but configuring all the WP and HTML websites in Apache. In many cases, it’s possible to just copy over the ‘.conf’ files and tweak any paths that may have changed because of the different folder structure on the new Apache installation.

This new instance configuration is sooo much better. The way Certbot bangs out those cert renewals is a dream come true. Ubuntu updates are a piece of cake, and there’s so much more info on the internet on this OS vs the Bitnami version. And another bonus with this new instance: you get more storage space in the ‘OS only’ instance for the same price vs the Bitnami/LAMP one – 60GB vs 40GB for the same monthly fee.

So I just finished the bulk of this project a couple of weekends ago. All my domains have been pointed to the new IP address and I check all the sites often and no glitches. This is all wonderfully affordable, just as I was hoping for, but a little scary. When things go wrong now, there’s no tech support to call. There’s only me and my obsessive use of ‘snapshots’, a great way to freeze a copy of your good server configuration for use as a backup in case things go horribly wrong.

Edit 12-31-2021 (yes, new year’s eve): This is a post on one glitch I discovered a while after unfolding this here wonderfully cheerful story.