Hey everyone!
I’ve been thinking about moving my WordPress sites to a VPS and I’m wondering about the time investment. For those of you running WordPress on your own virtual private servers, what’s the usual duration from start to finish for a complete setup?
I’m talking about the whole process - configuring the server, connecting your domain, setting up SSL certificates, and getting WordPress installed and ready to go.
Are you using automation scripts to speed things up? Maybe control panels like cPanel or Plesk? Or do you prefer doing everything through command line manually?
I’d really appreciate hearing about your workflows and which parts tend to eat up the most time. Thanks!
From my experience running multiple WordPress sites on VPS, the actual hands-on work takes about 2-3 hours if you’re doing everything manually through SSH. The biggest time consumer is usually the initial server hardening and security configuration, which can easily take an hour if you’re being thorough with firewall rules, fail2ban setup, and user permissions. I’ve found that using something like ServerPilot or RunCloud cuts this down significantly - maybe 30-45 minutes total since they handle most of the LAMP stack configuration automatically. The WordPress installation itself is maybe 10 minutes once everything else is ready. One thing that caught me off guard initially was SSL certificate verification delays. Even with Let’s Encrypt, sometimes it takes longer than expected if your DNS hasn’t fully propagated yet. I always budget extra time for troubleshooting those little hiccups that inevitably come up during deployment.
Having deployed dozens of WordPress instances over the past few years, I typically allocate around 90 minutes for a complete setup when working with a fresh VPS. The actual configuration time depends heavily on whether you’re starting from a bare Ubuntu/CentOS install or using a pre-configured image. What really speeds things up for me is using Ansible playbooks for the repetitive stuff like Apache/Nginx configuration, MySQL setup, and PHP tuning. The domain pointing and SSL provisioning usually runs in parallel while I’m handling the WordPress database creation and file permissions. One bottleneck I’ve noticed that others don’t always mention is the initial server updates and package installations, especially on lower-tier VPS instances where bandwidth might be limited. This can add an unexpected 15-20 minutes to your timeline. I’ve also learned to always test the site thoroughly before considering it complete, which includes checking permalink structures and basic functionality. The whole process becomes much more predictable once you develop a consistent checklist approach.
i agree, it really varries. if u have a good plan, around 45 mins could work. waiting for dns to sync can take a while tho, usually like 20-30 mins. server setup and wp install is pretty quick if u know what ur doing.