Skylar Hinrichs reached out to Tiempo in late 2023 with a common problem: his personal blog was on a shared host that had gotten slow, and he didn’t want to learn server administration to fix it. The whole engagement is a useful illustration of the “shared Droplet” model I use for small personal sites where dedicated infrastructure would be overkill.
What he needed
- His existing WordPress site moved off the slow shared host without losing posts, images, or SEO juice.
- The site to load in under a couple of seconds instead of ten.
- To not have to think about server patches, plugin updates, or backups.
What I did
A standard WordPress migration onto a shared Droplet that already hosts a few other small Tiempo client sites. The shared-tenancy keeps costs low (each site contributes a fraction of the $6/month Droplet plus a small share of my management time) and lets sites this small not need their own server.
- Exported the existing site with All-in-One WP Migration.
- Imported into a fresh nginx vhost on the shared Droplet.
- Pointed the domain through Cloudflare for CDN + TLS.
- Issued a Cloudflare origin certificate so the origin doesn’t need its own Let’s Encrypt cert.
- Turned on the standard hardening: Wordfence, auto-updates, server-level backups, login URL moved.
Total downtime during the cutover was about 15 minutes. Post-migration page load dropped from ~9 seconds to ~1.2 seconds, mostly from getting off the contended shared host and onto Cloudflare’s edge.
What it costs him going forward
A flat monthly fee that’s a fraction of what a dedicated WordPress managed-hosting plan would run. He gets patches, monitoring, and someone to call if something breaks. He doesn’t get a dashboard or a portal. The trade-off is intentional: small personal sites don’t need the overhead of a SaaS-style hosting product.
You can find his blog at skylarhinrichs.com.
If you have a similar setup
If you have a personal blog or small business site on a shared host that’s gotten slow, and you don’t want to learn server admin, get in touch. This is one of the most common engagements I do.