PricingThe invoice arrives twelve months after you signed up and it is two to four times what you paid. Nothing went wrong and nobody broke a rule: you bought a promotional first term, and the renewal is the real price. It was on the page, in grey, under the price you actually read.
This is how the industry works, and you are not going to change it. You can learn to read it in thirty seconds.
The five questions
1. 1What is the renewal price, in numbers?Not "renews at the regular rate" — the number
September 18, 2026 · 3 min read WordPress“The host is slow” is the usual diagnosis and it is usually wrong. On nine sites out of ten the server is fine and something on top of it is doing far more work than it needs to. Here is the order we check, which is also roughly the order of how often each one turns out to be the culprit.
1. CacheIs anything cached at all? Check the response headers in a private window.
2. DatabaseHow long do the queries take, and how many are there?
3. PHP versionThe version the site actually runs, not the
September 18, 2026 · 4 min read PlatformNearly every shared hosting plan on the market offers MySQL or MariaDB and nothing else. The result is circular: frameworks default to MySQL because that is what shared hosting has, and shared hosting offers MySQL because that is what frameworks default to. If your stack wants Postgres, you are usually pushed straight to a VPS.
Sometimes that push is correct. Often it is not.
When you genuinely need PostgreSQL
Your framework’s ecosystem assumes it. Django and Rails both run on MySQL, but the
September 18, 2026 · 4 min read