It’s been some time now that I learned about Pikapods, a fully managed service which seems to be just nice for individual users like myself, interested in hosting open source apps, and paying as you go. They even give you a $5 welcome credit for you to try their service totally free.

Well, WordPress, used o power this site, is an open source app, and I had been looking for an excuse to try Pikapods.

This week the excuse finally came, when I noticed my hosting provider had not been keeping up with the MySQL version updates. As I had my account already created before, it was just a matter of setting the app up — which goes love in a pod, hence the name of the service —, what took 20 seconds and selecting how much CPU, memory and storage I wanted to use, besides where, geographically speaking, EU or US, I wanted it to be hosted.

In the blink of an eye everything was up and running. I must confess I’m really liking the service so far. The pod with the WordPress config that I have setup is expected to cost around $1.64 every month, so way cheaper than I had been paying to date, even taking into consideration I was paying for a service hosted in Brazil and paying in Reais.

This time migrating the posts and info from a host to another was a breeze. I used WordPress standard exporting tools and it was a matter of minutes until everything was recreated. And Pikapods allows you to associate a custom domain name to each pod you setup — yes, several apps can be hosted, and there are a lot of interesting apps available, with more still to come. I even got to solve an old peeve that I had: in the former host I was using, whenever I tried to link to any content in Trakt.tv — like the Loki TV show, for example — some bizarre JSON error was triggered and didn’t allow me through it. Now? This problem’s gone.

There’s no affiliated links involved in Pikapods, so I’m writing this first to document a change to this site, but mainly because the service is living up to my expectations. That’s great.