I had helped a friend host her WordPress website for free for some years, but the guilt of not doing regular updates and backups led me to seek a professional WordPress hosting solution.
I was surprised by the cost of Managed WordPress hosting. Being a programmer for 30 years, I knew that all of these big hosting companies had to automate their managed WordPress offerings. Meaning that they did not do that much work keeping the WordPress site up to date. So why did it have to cost that much? To be fair – sometimes things break and a human has to step in, but still. Perhaps the big companies didn’t have a proper automated solution in the first place?
Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to recommend something that I thought was not a fair solution. So I stepped up and thought to myself, ‘How hard can it be?’ I had already dabbled with automating parts of the admin tasks, so I wasn’t completely clueless about how to proceed. I “just” had to put all the pieces together.