Update: I’ve improved the WordPress Quickstart with new themes and images. Learn more!

Try WordPress Quickstart

My WordPress quickstart is a low cost, performance optimized installation that takes just a few minutes. It’s a pre-installed image of WordPress optimized with caching software varnish and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) as described in my popular tutorial; with the quickstart image there’s no need to work through the tutorial step by step.

The quickstart image is the simplest and fastest way to get started with a self-hosted, pre-configured, scalable version of WordPress. Buy now for $25.

What’s included:

Hi, I run Lookahead Consulting in Seattle. Follow me @reifman or email me.

• Pre-configured snapshot image of WordPress at Digital Ocean. If you keep your blog running, Digital Ocean will bill you $5 monthly.
• WordPress is optimized with the W3TC Plugin, Varnish Cache and swap File as described in my tutorial.
• Key plugins pre-installed: BetterWordPress XML Sitemaps, Contact Form 7, Disqus, Jetpack, Mailgun for WordPress, NextGen Facebook Open Graph, StatCounter, Vaultpress, W3TC and WordPress Importer
• Themes pre-installed: MySiteMyWay Construct Theme ($35 license not included), WordPress TwentyFourteen, TwentyThirteen and TwentyTwelve
• Digital Ocean images run on solid state drives (SSD) for additional high speed performance

If you need hands-on assistance configuring your domain name DNS record or editing the domain in your Apache web server configurartion, please order the premium installation for $50.

If you’d prefer a managed hosting solution for WordPress, I recommend WPEngine. WPEngine offers economical, high performance managed WordPress hosting for about $29 monthly.

Publishing with WordPress

Please be sure to check out my new Publishing with WordPress guide which covers all the things you’ll want to keep in mind as you grow your WordPress site.