10/22/2026
I've said for years that it is expensive to be ignorant.
For years, the host for Keep Children Rockin, DOWF and my book's website was a small Amazon Lightsail server. A simple multi-site WordPress instance.
The last few months, the server kept going down.
Turns out, that little virtual machine had outgrown its purpose. Because I do regular backups, I was able to take the latest backup and use it to spin up a newer, slightly more powerful Lightsail instance.
Then, all I had to do was change the domains to point to the new IP address of this updated server.
Viola!
All the sites are running and stable again.
I'm not a coder. In fact, I went to school for electrical engineering because I wanted to play with circuits and not write code.
But many years ago, I learned how to host my own WordPress site so I wouldn't have to rely on any one person or host.
Over the years, I kept learning how to responsibly care for a WordPress site. Regular updates of the theme, plug-ins and base WordPress version. Making regular backups. Using a basic security plug-in to prevent being hacked by bots.
I kept learning. Figure out how you can host multiple sites on a single virtual server.
But when the server started having problems, that is where my knowledge hit a ceiling. I was able to figure out WHAT was causing the issue. But no idea how to solve it on the existing server.
But since it was an issue of the virtual server being overloaded, I understood that.
And I took a risk to spin up a new server and modify the DNS.
But it fixed the problem.
Had I been ignorant to how this stuff works, I would have absolutely had to pay hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand, of dollars to fix the issue.
And, candidly, if my solution of a larger server had not worked, I absolutely would have been forced to pay someone much smarter than me with that kind of specialty.
Anyway, the lesson is this: learn how stuff works. You don't need to be an expert or even know how to do the stuff on your own.
But you need to at least understand how it works conceptually, and understand it enough to have a reasonably educated conversation about it.
Otherwise, your ignorance can easily be taken advantage of and you will end up being sold virtual blinker fluid >_
