Adventures in Pi - Challenges Hosting Wordpress

Well after five straight days of a most frustrating Linux-based hell, I finally gave up (for now) on hosting my blog on my Raspberry Pi. It's completely doable, I know, but the amount of workarounds and alteration of code just wasn't worth it right now with all the other stuff going on. There's a ton of documentation on how to get it up and running, but the process is so far from streamlined that as soon as I got one thing working, another problem arose, and we're talking 20-30 major issues. So I'm officially taking a break from trying to host WordPress on my Pi.

A lot of my shortcomings are do to the fact that the Pi is my first exposure to a Linux based operating system. On the plus side, I now have a much more intimate relationship with Linux. I don't love it by any means, but I'm starting to understand it. That obviously can't be a bad thing. Also, another positive is I am now decently familiar with WordPress. Really, what I should do is go ahead and host my blog on a Windows based machine. I'd probably have it fully up and running in a day. But the lure of having a website hosted for free on a tiny credit card sized computer seemed novel.

To be fair, I had the whole site hosted and it 'worked,' but it was slow to load and some of the more important customization's were instructing me to alter the http
d.conf and .htaccess files. In the end, the inability to change the permalink settings and the subsequent 5 hours of getting nowhere closer to fixing it is what made me hang up the gloves.

Just a few words for anyone new to Linux and attempting to host a webpage on their Raspberry Pi...

1)The Pi can only handle so much traffic and loads very slowly.

2)As far as I can tell there is NO one single guide out there that will help you accomplish a proper LAMP stack combined with WordPress. Be prepared to read tons of them and pick out tips that will help you.

3) One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was installing WordPress on a partition that was nearly full. If you're not a Linux wiz this could be a huge problem halfway through the process. mysql will fail to start properly and it will be a headache. So do yourself a favor and make sure you have plenty of space to work with.

So all in all, it was an  interesting ride into the inner workings of Linux, the Raspberry Pi, and WordPress. My brain feels a little fried, so for the next few weeks I think I'll take a nice vacation in Windowsland. And although the last 5 days pissed me off to no end, I wouldn't take back the experience of learning some new stuff. I'll be back at this self hosting on the Pi thing as soon as I get some more free time.