For years I’d been on IONOS shared hosting. Multiple sites across one account, all sharing the same resources, all subject to the same control panel limitations, all running whatever PHP version was current that week. It worked. It was cheap. It was also a ceiling I’d been quietly bumping my head against for longer than I wanted to admit.
Couldn’t run my own cron jobs the way I wanted. Couldn’t tune PHP-FPM. Couldn’t install most of the things I wanted to install. Couldn’t get real SSH access to anything that mattered. Each one a small thing on its own. Stacked up over four or five years, they amounted to a slow itch I couldn’t scratch through a web panel.
AXIOM was the answer. My own VPS, my own everything, HestiaCP for the WordPress sites that needed a panel and command-line access for the bits that didn’t. It had been live and hardened for a few weeks by the time I started moving sites across, and AUTO had already been running as the dev mirror long enough to feel ordinary. The vulcan.institute migration had been the first real shakedown. The wider sweep was the follow-up.
Most of my own sites came across. gndn.me. vulcan.institute. Bits and pieces from older projects that had been mouldering on shared hosting for years. WordPress migrations are tedious whatever you’re moving them between – database exports, DNS cutovers, SSL re-issuing, the bit where you discover one site had a plugin that hardcoded the old domain in fifteen places and now your search-replace pass needs another search-replace pass. None of that gets better just because you’ve graduated to a VPS. It’s the cost of doing business with WordPress.
The one site that didn’t move is the one that matters most.
Beurre Pâtisserie stays on its managed hosting. Connor and Raf’s business runs through that site – real orders, real customers, real money. The homelab instinct said move it, of course it said move it, that’s what the homelab instinct says about everything. The homelab instinct is also frequently wrong. A live e-commerce site for an actual business has no business being on a server I’m still tinkering with. The fact that I’m capable of running it isn’t the same as it being a good idea.
Managed hosting isn’t a lesser product. It’s a different product for a different job. Someone else worries about the patching cadence, someone else worries about the uptime SLA, someone else is on the hook when something at the infrastructure layer goes sideways at three in the morning. That’s worth paying for when there’s a business attached. Pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of homelab-ego trap that ends with Connor texting me on a Saturday because the checkout’s down and I’m the one who said it’d be fine.
So Beurre stays put. The cake business doesn’t need to be on my experiment.
The other thing that stays put is email. IONOS Mail Basic 5 carries on doing its thing – personal mail, BOE mail, everything that needs to arrive reliably and not end up in spam. Self-hosting email in 2026 is one of those projects that sounds tempting until you read about deliverability, sender reputation, SPF and DKIM and DMARC, IP block lists, the warm-up period for new mail servers, and the cheerful certainty that one bad week will land you on Microsoft’s permanent naughty list. There are battles worth fighting and battles where the only winning move is letting someone else handle it. Outgoing mail is firmly in the second category.
The cost calculation surprised me. Shared hosting feels cheap until you actually look at what a small VPS costs. The gap is much narrower than the marketing pages suggest, and what you get for the difference is root access, your own resources, and the freedom to break things in interesting ways without affecting anyone else’s site. For someone who’d already been writing wish-lists of things they couldn’t do on shared, that’s not even a close call.
There’s a small irony I should probably acknowledge. I migrated off IONOS shared hosting onto an IONOS VPS. Same provider, different product tier. I picked AXIOM’s spec because it suited what I needed and the London datacentre matters for the UK sites I’m hosting, not out of any particular loyalty. The shared hosting did its job for years. The VPS is doing a different job now. Same logo, very different relationship.
What I came out with is a working setup where the sites I’m allowed to break live on AXIOM, the site that pays my brother’s rent stays on managed hosting where it belongs, and email lives somewhere it can’t take everything else down with it. Three different products for three different jobs.
The discipline of leaving working things alone is harder than it sounds. The migration was the easy bit.