Maintaining The TaylorNet
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Right now the TaylorNet consists of nattaylor.com, taylorednutrition.com, tayloryachtdesigns.com, r19fleet5.org and a handful of others, which comes with a maintenance burden and a cost. So is sort of a post to myself to remind me why I do certain things.
- Email I’ve given up on self-hosted email entirely due to deliverability issues and reliability. For business critical email, I recommend licensing Google Workspace. For the rest, I choose between MXRoute (if I need to send) or email forwarding with my registrar.
- Domains I’m slowly consolidating on Porkbun, after being frustrated by Google Domains sale to Squarespace. Porkbun has a decent feature set, including free email forwarding and whois privacy.
- DNS I briefly ran my own nameserver, but it is much easier to just use the registrar!
- Server Administration I’ve adopted Virtualmin, and the GUI makes things super easy. Setting up a new domain with a LetsEncrypt certification is just a few clicks. Security updates are baked in. Critically, it can automatically backup to S3.
- Software WordPress is king!
- WordPress For WordPress, I strive to keep things really simple. wp-sqlite-db is amazing, because it means the database can be backed up without a MySQL dump! I always enable some kind of caching, usually WP Super Cache. I always enable auto updates. For themes, I’m fond of GeneratePress, since its fairly simple. I’m increasingly consolidating an updated image upload flow that only saves a single WebP file. I’ve also found these plugins simple, light and great: https://wordpress.org/plugins/lightbox-photoswipe/, https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-list/, https://wordpress.org/plugins/postie/ & https://wordpress.org/plugins/sliderpro/