Free egress is not free serving. R2 still bills every read, S3 does not bill origin transfer to CloudFront, and the variable that decides both bills is cache hit ratio. An evenhanded comparison of Cloudflare R2 vs Amazon S3 for media offloading, with the four levers that move the number and a decision procedure you can run against your own traffic.
Moving one WordPress site is easy. Moving twenty in a weekend is a pipeline, and the failures that cost you are the quiet ones: writes landing on the old server, cron firing on two boxes, certificates blocked by ACME rate limits. Here is the fleet migration process I use, from manifest to per-site rollback.
The dashboard is fine for editing a post. It is a terrible tool for anything touching a thousand rows, twelve plugins or two servers. Here are the WP-CLI commands that save hours on migrations, plugin conflicts, stalled cron and integrity checks, grouped by the job that eats the time, with the failure modes each one hides.
Managed WordPress hosting and a self-managed VPS can both serve a fast site. They differ on which failures land on you. A practical comparison covering visit metering, disallowed plugin policies, silent backup failure, patching debt, and a cost model that survives contact with reality.
MySQL was gone in the morning because the kernel picked it to reclaim memory from Redis. Redis ships configured as a durable datastore, and you are using it as a cache. Setup takes ten minutes; the gotchas are memory limits, shared namespaces and the one enormous key nobody mentions.
Your homepage loads instantly and your dashboard takes eight seconds. That is not a contradiction: wp-admin is the only part of your site that never gets cached. Here is where the time actually goes, in the order worth checking.
A plugin quietly reverts after every deploy and nobody knows why. That is what happens when Git and wp-admin both think they own the file tree. Here is how to build a deployment workflow where the repo is the source of truth and the database only ever travels one way.