Where does people host their Wordpress install used for headless wordpress?

Hi everybody. I have some experience building web pages with Gatsby and some experience building pages in “traditional” CMC like Joomla and WordPress. However, I would really like to try building a headless page using WordPress and Gatsby.js or Next.js. Any recommendations for where to host the actual WordPress page? Can’t help thinking that it may be possible to find a cheap/free solution for my first project. The actual front end will be on Netlify obviously! :grinning:

While I haven’t personally done Wordpress <–> Gatsby integration, in the past I used to host my websites on InfinityFree. It’s a PHP web host that supports WordPress.

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Cool! I will look into that!
Thanks for taking the time to help :blush: :+1:

Ahh, one more question while I am at it! Can I somehow “block” wordpress from rendering it’s own frontend!? I guess what I am asking here is if it’s possible to add extra layers of security to make the headless WordPress more secure somehow? Doesn’t really help much with a super secure headless frontend if the “old” frontend is still live and vulnerable for attacks.

You could possibly add a redirect, not sure if that will help. Or since it’s a PHP host, you can use .htaccess to redirect based on User Agent. Basically, you can whitelist your Wordpress to be visible only to 1 UA and since only you’d know that custom UA, only you could see it. But yeah, you’ll constantly have to open developer tools to spoof your UA to be able to access your own website.

Wow, I’d forgotten how much I hate cPanel-based hosting.

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Ahh, I tend to agree with you :sweat_smile:
But WordPress IS great for content creators that can’t write a single line of code.
I think headless WordPress is a great way to make JamStack pages for the large crowd that have experience with WordPress.
Let’s not forget that learning a different CMS interface CAN be a large step for a lot of people!

This is probably getting off topic, but you don’t need a cPanel host to run WordPress. There are many excellent managed WordPress hosting options (none free, however), as well as options such as Digital Ocean that are inexpensive and very performant.

I recall doing this a few years ago and using a plugin that forced headless mode and sorted out redirects etc.

FWIW I hosted & managed WordPress using ServerPilot + Vultr VMs, which was fairly cheap ~$5/mo for each.

Then I moved all WordPress sites I was managing to JAMstack, Netlify CMS or Prismic CMS (or even no-CMS) so I could forget about sysadmin tasks!

@Jinksi +1 for ServerPilot as a front-end manager for server management. I use it with Digital Ocean.

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Cool with all the feedback on hosting.
For now I just use a subdomain on a server I use for another page. Works fine for development.

Have to say that headless WordPress is nice!

As developers we tend to be really excited about JamStack, but building pages that can be easily managed by someone with no coding skills, Headless WordPress gives you a lot of nice options.

Stuff like deploy preview links integrated directly in WordPress is really a gamechanger!