Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well, I am now spending $30/month on Digital Ocean, $60/month on Cloudways and I can’t update my Digital Ocean Ubuntu 20.04, the dist-upgrade keeps failing and the Cloudways thing is just unbearably slow. Ironically, I’m finding the $10/month Inmotion Hosting to be much faster than a virtual server, but I have to figure out the best to install

The many option of InMotion: BoldGrid is only 7.4 with Inherit

I’m glad that I’ve used Bluehost for years because there is quite a maze of setup, here is what you have to know:

1. There is an overall hosting setup, if. you just to to Inmotion Hosting and login, then you are in their Account Management Panel or AMP, this gets you to your overall billing section and below that you should see a section for your actual server.
2. Options for managing your server, well you have a bunch of them. Cpanel is the management tool for WordPress. Softaculus is their way of installing prebuilt applications. There are two big flavors here BoldGrid which is a layer on WordPress and then WordPress administration itself.
3. I first tried BoldGrid, but it is using an over version of PHP v7.x so that is a no go as the current tongfamily.com is on PHP 8.x (and sadly richtong.com on Digital Ocean is stuck on PHP7.x and Ubuntu 20.04. I’ve tried to upgrade each in turn and the site just dies).

Softaculus and WordPress

So I went back to the WordPress installation. This is nice in that it gives you installation sets and you can install Multi-site WordPress from the get go. I might just do that as it would be nice to host microsites in the future.

I have to Softaculus is kind of way too cute a name but it is very fast, you can see the installations that you have and then it is just one button to delete them.

The first step is to look at my current WordPress installation and see all the plugins I have, this will make restore easier. The core one is UpdraftPlus because that’s how I’m currently doing backups to my Google Drive since the site is tiny.

You can also just select some common plugins before you login and as I said you can select Multi-site. Note that confusingly, when. you install with regular WordPress, you get the option to install BoldGrid on top. Now to check the PHP version, the quickest way is Dashboard > Site Health > Info and unfortunately this is only PHP 7.x as well.

Inmotion PHP 8.x has to be forced

So it turns out that if you just use the Cpanel > Software > MultiPHP Manager and then for. your site instead of Inherit, you hard set it to PHP 8.3 then it updates magically from PHP 7.4. Wow that was hard to find. Apparently there is some default in the isntallation, so after doing a Boldgrid (if you don’t want your own plugins) or a WordPress installation if you do this is the best way.

Cloning a WordPress vs importing an upgrade

There is an option in Cpanel to just import a WordPress update if you give it an FTP address. I normally want a fresh installation and then import the data to make sure that I don’t have corrupted installations as happened with the Digital Ocean to Cloudways migration.

Fast management with Softalicous

It is really nnice that while WP-admin has all the plugin stuff, you can also use Softalicious to pick plug-ins. Note that the installation is one page, but after you do it, make sure to choose Security Measures and click all the buttons.

Restore to a Multi-user Site is a paid option, but single site works!

WEll, I actually though I could get running a Multiuser site, but it turns out Updraft says that’s a pay option. It’s so easy to bring up and tear down, I’ll just start with a single site first.

Amazingly when I did a restore, by first installing Updraft on the destination site and I then connected it to my Google Drive. Then there is an option to Scan Remote Site which it did and then I actually got it to restore the old site. Updraft is even smart enough to change the site name in the database, but the one thing it doesn’t do is deal with Two Factor Authentication.

How to get into the login? Hard reset needed using new PHP function

So I had to start over again and make sure I had 2FA turned off on some administrative so I could login and reset all the passwords and tried it without 2FA, but that still didn’t work, so time to try a bolder password reset.

The send a new link doesn’t work probably because the mail authentication is broken in the copy. So now its time to reset the SQL database itself with phpMyAdmin. With Inmotion you go to Inmotion AMP > Cpanel > Databases > phpMyAdmin

Now in phpMyadmin, go to the database on the left and look for wp_users or whatever the prefix you have but just search for “users” and then browse and you should see some familiar names. The guide says select MD5 but unfortunately this is no longer here, so it looks like you have to do your own encoding. MD5 is no longer support so I thought I might try the password_hash() PHP function, but later guides say you should use the password_hash() PHP function instead.

The old salted thing I got started with $P$B and this new one is completely different hash format, but I got in!

The second problem is that with my old site, it allowed the Nickname to be the same as the user name, so you can manually reset the accounts, but make sure you make the Nicknames different.

Emailing with InMotion does not work change Administration Email Address not SMTP Mail fail

Now the next problem is all the password reset login doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to know how to mail. I loaded up SMTPMail and I tried to get it to work directly with Google, but although I have all the secrets, it said doesn’t work. It just says not configured properly

The other option is to use the InMotion email instead of Gmail. You have to grovel in the InMotion CPanel to figure out how to access that mail thorogh AMP > CPanel > Email > Email Account and you discover that you have some randomly named mail account. and you go to can use roundcube to read it.

And I know see the problem, I’ve been trying to send mail as rich@tongfamily.com, but InMotion of course can’t do that, so you have to either configure this SMTP Mail thing or use the native email for this server. This is set in WP Admin > Settings > General > Administration Email Address and so you can just create one here in Cpanel > Email Accounts > Create on the upper right and then change it and you should get email. Of course if you are just copying a full database over this is not going to work, so see the hack above to reset passwords and then you are here.

The additional trial is that to change the email address, it has to be recognized, so you have to use the funky email address that is the base, something like rich@ngxXXX.inmotionhosting.com which is pretty confusing

Inmotion Stack vs Cloudways Stack

Now one difference between all these hosters is their recommended stack of services, so in doing this, I removed the Cloudways installed and replaced with the recommended ones in Softalicous

Plugin	InMotion Softaculus	Cloudways	Rich’s Favorite
Backup	BoldGrid		UpdraftPlus
PHP Object Cache	Redis Cache	Object Cache Pro (Needs Redis underneath) Opcache Manager,
Page Cache	SpeedyCache (Softaculus)	Breeze (Cloudy)
SEO	SiteSEO (Can’t find)		MonsterInsights
Security	Loginizer (Softaculus)		Akismet, Solid Security Basic
Email	GoSMTP (Sofaculus)	Configure PHP Mail in Cloudways Console	WP Mail (Most popular) needs web app creation
File Manager	FileOrganizer (Softaculus)		FileOrganizer
Website Builder	BoldGrid
Forms	weForms
Jetpack (try to deprecate)	Jetpack	Jetpack	Jetpack, Social (Dropping Boost, Protect)
Serverside	Nginx Profile
Mastodon			ActivityPub, Enable Mastodon, Friends, Friends Autoresolve, Friends Parser Fraidyscrape, Include Mastodon Feed, Autopost, Nodeinfo, Simple Mastodon verification, Webfinger
Update	Automatic Updates selected		Advanced Automatic Updates (deprecate)
Amazon			Auto Tagger
Images			Cloudinary
Cookie GCPR			Cookie Notice
Logging and Debug and Cron			Decalog, Error Log Monitor, PHP Compatibility Checker, Query Monitor, WPControl
Blogging			Feeds for YouTube, podcast player, YouTube by Embed Plus (Not clear if both needed)
URL Shortener			Hum
Content			KaTex, WP Mermaid (not available try MerPress)
Newsletters			Newsletter
Sync			Sync Post With Other Site

Now, I created a Install Set to capture all of these so you don’t have to install them one at a time in the future.

Redis Cache does not work on InMotion Shared Hosting

There are two kinds of caches in WordPress, there’s the page cache which you can turn on with JetPack Boost (ugh, trying to get away from Automaticc’s antics), or a separate page cacher which is Breeze on Cloudways and SpeedyCache on InMotion.

When I tried to just clone the site, Breeze complained about needing settings, so I went back to the Inmotion recommendation. And I also deleted Object Cache Pro for the same reason.

The Reds cache is more complicated, it actually caches the PHP code snippets. And InMotion recommends the simple Redis cache although a quice search shows that LiteSpeed is much more popular.

It does want access to port 6379 so you have enable this in the firewall, so you need to get to the Web Host Manager (WHM) which should be ar your ./whm but this is only on VPS (Virtual Private Server) or real Servers, you do not get this with WordPress shared hosting which is too bad, but the server is actually much faster than Cloudways or Digital ocean so I can’t complain.

Get Sync post working

This is always a little confusing, but it works well, basiclly you install Sync Post on both the souirce and destination then:

1. On the sourc, you choose Add More Site
2. Enter the site and the user name and password

I’m not quite sure how two factor authentication actually works here, so you might need to use an account that does not have 2FA on which is a little scary, but it seems to work.

We do have the following problems:

On the Inmotion Hosting, I see the post just in draft mode not the final one. This could be because I had a draft post already there so it would not overwrite it. I deleted it and it worked

But I just did it agtain and Inmotion seems to work

Cloudinary not working on Digital Ocean site

The cloudinary stuff seems to work on the main site and the InMotion one, but not the the raw Digital ocean one.

1. When I go to the main site, it says there were sync errors.
2. The first thing I did was to turn asset serving from all plugins and everywhere.
3. Then I noticed that the two sites that are working report 1360 optimized assets and 58MB original size, so I’m trying a resynce of the 1360 assets, It says 191 assets excluded, I presume this is because I don’t include all plugins.