Tim Clarke is helping a faculty member get Ghost up and running on Reclaim Cloud, and has used Reclaim’s EdTech Discord channel to ask for clarification around Mailgun settings and environmental variables. Both of which I did not document fully in my Ghost series earlier this year. Tsk, tsk, Jimmy! What’s more, Taylor Jadin has showed me an easier way to add environment variables to Ghost since then, so I figured I would quickly document it. This below method allows you to add the Ghost site’s URL and/or Mailgun settings to the container without editing the config file on the server, this makes any updates easier to do.
His questions also helped me realize we do have all the necessary stats around open rates for our newsletter in Mailgun, but that data is not being recognized/shared with Roundup’s Ghost install, so will have to dig in a bit deeper. I am also quite glad Tim asked this question cause I was really happy to learn almost 60% of folks subscribed to the Roundup have at the very least opened it. Yeah!
N.B. – The variables option illustrated here works for a Ghost instance installed directly from Docker Hub on Reclaim Cloud. If you install Ghost within Docker Engine you no longer have the ability to add variables directly to the container’s Variables setting in Reclaim Cloud, you will need to edit them within Ghost at on the container at /var/lib/ghost/config.production.json and then reload the container being sure to give it some time to come back up.
I recently welcomed a new game into bavacade, namely Pleiades. The acquisition of which reminded me of a scene from a childhood favorite b-movie horror omnibus called Nightmares (1983). I just posted about this film and its relationship—at least in my mind—to another 80s cult classic Repo Man. As I mentioned in that post, there is a scene where JJ Cooney (Emilio Estevez) is hustling a kid out of money at Pleiades while listening to Fear’s “Let’s Have a War.” You can see that scene in the clip below:
And for those with a discerning arcade ear, you might realize the sound effects that they link with Pleiades are actually for Moon Cresta, but that may be outside your golden age of video games arcade trivia pay-grade.
Anyway, all that led me back to Nightmares to play one of my favorite movie games, identify the video game cabinet. I should do a whole series of posts on video games that show up in 80s movies—it speaks volumes to their ubiquity and also tells an interesting tale of just how popular arcade games were during the early 1980s. In terms of business revenue, I love this bit from the “golden age of arcade video games” Wikipedia page:
In 1982, the arcade video game industry’s revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion[22] surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined that year.[22][23] It also exceeded the revenues of all major sports combined at the time,[23] earning three times the combined ticket and television revenues of Major League Baseball, basketball, and American football, as well as earning twice as much as all the casinos in Nevada combined.[24]
The idea that arcade games had more revenue than all major sports combined is mind-blowing, not to mention Hollywood and pop music. It’s easy to forget just how big a phenomenon they were in the early 80s, and while they never really lost steam in terms of growing popularity (in fact, they are once again bigger than Hollywood and professional sports combined in the US thanks to the pandemic) they can be easily overlooked given how ingrained into the culture they’ve become. So, it’s always interesting to see early 80s takes on arcades, video game addictions, delinquent youth, and punk rock—and “Bishop of Battle” has it all and more. But that’s not what this post is about, it’s actually about what I discovered when re-watching Nightmares, and this is where things get a bit geeky.
Over the last several years I’ve worked with Tim to create Reclaim Arcade, which has been a total blast and has pushed me into all kinds of cool corners of not only buying these old games but also repairing and restoring them. When it became clear during the pandemic I was not going back to the US anytime soon to enjoy Reclaim Arcade, I started collecting games here in Italy, hence the bavacade. One of the coolest things I discovered was a whole bootleg market in Italy wherein companies would “borrow” games from the US market (such as Asteroids, Scramble, Phoenix, Dig Dug, Galaga, Missile Command, etc.) and then reverse engineer them, re-name them, and create new cabinet designs to hop on the wave that was invading Europe as well. The premier Italian company doing this was Sidam, and I have three of their games: Asterock (Asteroids bootleg), Condor (Phoenix bootleg), and Explorer (Scramble bootleg). The Explorer cabinet’s side art is particularly beautiful, it is like panels from a comic book of an astronaut in space.
So, it struck me when I was searching for screenshots of the “Bishop of Battle” episode to come across side art from an Explorer:
The Explorer side art in Bishop of battle
I recognized that red astronaut behind Emilio, that’s Explorer! I was pretty excited, and it prompted me to go through the scene in the arcade when JJ Cooney gets to the 13th level of the game, at which point it is no longer a game. The collapse of the virtual and real worlds is realized on level 13—kinda like the 13th floor—and the space shooter is now taking place within a mall arcade in the Valley. The animation for this sequence is pretty amazing, and according to the IMDB trivia page it almost killed the production given how much it ran over budget.
Don’t shoot the Explorer JJ! You can just make out the Explorer cabinet to the right of the red glowing orb
But back to Sidam’s Explorer, it actually plays a key role in this scene as the arcade cabinet that is routinely blown up by JJ Cooney as he tries to shoot the adversaries that have come out of the game into the arcade. Below you can get a good shot of the Explorer cabinet falling like a chopped tree:
A falling Explorer
And sadly, below, you see the cabinet lying lifeless on the arcade floor. It breaks my heart.
A downed Explorer
In the following shot you can just about glimpse the Explorer marquee as it is being shot for a second time in this sequence, turns out Explorer was one of the games they deemed unworthy enough to sacrifice multiple times. I mean it’s just an Italian-made knock-off of Scramble, which they already have in this arcade. And you don’t see them destroying an Asteroids, it’s way too valuable!
You can just make out the Explorer marquee in this shot
The morning after JJ’s late night exploits the Explorer can be seen, once again, lying dead on the floor.
Image of a destroyed Explorer the morning after
And when the arcade proprietor, Willy, picks up a piece of the wreckage to bemoan the vandals, he grabs a broken part of the Explorer cabinet which can be identified by the side art.
Willy, the arcade proprietor, removing a broken piece of the Explorer cabinet
It’s an Explorer bloodbath! I would really love to know how many of these Sidam cabinets made it to the US, and even more interesting—why? Seems like selling to US distributors/arcades would be against Sidam’s interests given they were clearly ripping the intellectual property off from US and Japanese companies, so it would behoove them to keep it in Europe. Anyway, not sure on those details, but following the fate of this Explorer was quite fun. It was a sacrificial lamb, and I can’t help but think its status as foreign fake, hence lesser, was part of that decision.
I recently picked up Scream Factory’s 2015 blu-ray release of Nightmares (1983), a low-budget urban legends/horror omnibus in the vein of Creepshow (1982) and Cat’s Eye (1985)—the latter of which my brother loved. I’ve been watching and re-watching “The Bishop of Battle” episode of Nightmares because it is not only the best of the four chapters by a long shot, but also because it has some vintage footage of early 80s arcades—not to mention a prolonged sequence highlighting the gameplay of Pleiades to the soundtrack of Fear’s “Let’s have a War.”
It’s a lot of fun to watch this 25 minute episode and try to identify the various games of the era in the arcades. In fact, there was a pretty big surprise for me in my recent close watchings, but I’ll save that revelation for my next post. Like and subscribe!
Here I want to highlight something I stumbled upon that provides an interesting link, at least for me, between the “The Bishop of Battle” episode another childhood favorite: Repo Man (1984). To set the stage, in “Bishop of Battle” young punk JJ Cooney (Emilio Estevez) hustles some kids in a downtown LA arcade to raise money for his video game addiction. He and his accomplice just barely escape on the bus after being found out and pursued. In the above scene, immediately following their getaway, you see them exiting the bus and heading to their local arcade in the Valley which is like totally in a mall.
In this companion scene from Repo Man you also have a young 80s punk, Otto, played again by Emilio Estevez just a year later who also listens to the same LA punk bands he did in “Bishop of Battle.” And it’s almost an identical shot of Otto returning from LA, but this time not to an arcade but his parents house to get some promised college money. Otto is ultimately frustrated when he hears his hippie parents have given his college money to a TV evangelist who is supplying bibles to El Salvador.
What’s wild about these scenes is almost as if JJ and Otto are the same character walking out of one film into another at different, yet chronologically aligned, moments in their young adult life. In “Bishop of Battle” JJ admits stealing quarters to his concerned parents but promises it’s all about to end once he beats the Bishop.
In Repo Man, you find Otto a year later having graduated high school in a dead-end job at a super market looking for a way out.
After Otto loses his job and his parents can’t help him he resigns to becoming a repo man. And after working with Bud (the great Harry Dean Stanton!) for a while you find him wearing the shirt and tie rejecting his punk past as he jokes about ever liking the Circle Jerks. So good!
I don’t know why it hit me so hard—like a diamond through the forehead— but after seeing the bus scene in “Bishop of Battle” and an almost identical Emilio Estevez, if only a bit younger, it got me wondering if Alex Cox had scene Nightmares and said, “That’s my Otto!” And, on top of that, used his Edge City bus scenes as a subtle homage to Joseph Sargent’s episode in Nightmares, which is really the template from which Otto seems to be built. Probably not, but I like to think the lattice of coincidence is alive and well in these films 🙂
Trying to play a bit of catch-up on my bavacade given I have made some significant strides towards getting fully operational. One of the recent highlights was finally getting the Gyrussmultigame mod-kit installed so that it can also allow you to play Time Pilot and Pooyan. This mod-kit was by far the most complex yet with the need to desolder 5 chips and install as many daughter boards, and that was just on the main board. There is an additional daughter board for the auxiliary/sound board as well, bringing the gran total to 6 additional boards on the boards.
Here is a look at the Gyruss boards before the mod-kit was installed:
And here is an image after the installation:
The A6/A7 daughter board in the image above (you can identify it by the white stick with writing) has a socket for connecting to the main board, which gives you a sense of the Frankenstein creation of the whole thing 🙂 If you want more details images of the game board chips there is a Flickr album here.
I love having Pooyan and Time Pilot easily accessible on Gyruss by simply pressing down the player 1 button for 5 seconds and being brought to the selector screen to choose my game of choice. I particularly love Pooyan, so that is a total treat for me—it’s the three little pigs fairy tale come to video games:
Although one thing you might notice here, and also on the Time Pilot screen below is that there is a bit of bleeding in the graphics under Free Play, Round One, and the momma pig’s elevator.
You can see the bleeding pretty starkly against the black background of Time Pilot’s opening screen, particularly underneath the red “LICENSED FROM KONAMI.” Not a deal breaker per se, but I would like to know if that is an issue with the mod-kit, or something else. The strange bit is Gyruss shows no signs of that bleeding, so I am thinking—perhaps mistakenly—it’s the mod kit.
That said, the actual game play of Time Pilot shows no bleeding at all, so it is bizarre.
One of the things I learned after trying to desolder and socket chips on the Stargate board which resulted in breaking a trace was that using a desoldering gun on these boards may not be the best approach for a newbie like me. I gave this board to Roberto, a local game repair guru, and he desoldered the five chips and added sockets for me. He recommended as much after seeing my early attempts on the A2 chip on this board, but luckily I knew I was heading into troubled waters and swam back to shore immediately. I guess desoldering a pristine board like this Gyruss with hot air rather than a gun that touches the board is both a cleaner and safer way to go.
This was the last of the multigame mod-kits I had to install in the cabinets I have here in Italy. And it feels good to have gotten that done because as of today I officially have 14 more games on the way to the bavacade, and I have a few mod-kits on-hand to install on those games when they arrive, most excitedly Pac-man and Elevator Action! What’s more, I have to figure out where I’m going to put the 30+ games I have amassed!
Below is a quick video showing off the LED strip setup for lighting my Condor marquee. Most of the tube marquees I have work, but for those that do not I am installing a simple LED solution because it will be a bit more efficient, last longer, and help preserve the original equipment. Not to mention I don’t think you can buy old gold florescent lights in Italy any more. I know some might take issue with using LEDs for some abstract notion of purity, but after dealing with enough of these games that you want to actually play, you quickly learn that old power supply units represent a huge amount of overhead, and if you can modernize that alongside the original components you can save yourself some serious headaches.
Anyway, it was a pretty simple conversion. You can get strips of 12V LED lights and put them in a cut-to-size aluminum LED channel with a diffuser lens. After that, you would use a 12V switching power supply to convert the AC voltage (between 110-220V) coming into the original florescent light and convert it to 12V DC for the LED strip. Finally, I used silicon to fasten the aluminum LED channel to the pre-existing light fixture and that was that. It should cost about $20 to do this for a game, and it might save you at least that in electricity if you use them a fair amount.
I do think the Robotron and Condor LED marquees are looking quite good with their new LED light overlords!
Thankfully we are now 4 months into another highlight of 2022: the monthly newsletter Reclaim Roundup. Friday saw the fourth issue of this monthly chronicle of the work happening around Reclaim, it is something to behold.
Hard to convey how amazing it is to see a monthly collection of the great work happening @reclaimhosting via our Roundup newsletter. We are 4 months in now, and it has done wonders for keeping our distributed team connected through all the awesome work https://t.co/OcANcE4dGc
And as I mentioned on Twitter this weekend, it can do wonders for keeping a distributed team like ours connected. And while we now have over 500 subscribers (more on that dangerous number in a bit) and has potential as a marketing tool, I think more than anything it provides a look inside the daily work at Reclaim Hosting which makes it an ideal hiring tool. We have been unbelievably fortunate with attracting amazing talent over the last year—Pilot Irwin‘s work on the Roundup is one of many examples of that—and I want to believe the newsletter not only provides folks important announcements, but also a look inside the work folks are doing at the company more generally.
This would be particularly relevant for anyone who might be considering applying for our recently announced Instructional Support Specialist position. I think it was Cloudflare that noted their blog was as much, if not more so, a recruiting tool than a broader marketing channel for new business. It’s a way to give potential colleagues a sense of what’s happening and who is doing it—I love that perspective. For me blogging was always about documenting the work, and the newsletter is just documenting all the work from everyone at Reclaim all at once. It’s like a monthly mega-blog!
On a more technical note about this month’s newsletter—and back to that 500 subscribers number—we had an issue with sending out the email for the first time. When Pilot published the newsletter in Ghost we got an error that no emails could be sent. Turns out the official Docker instance of Ghost we’re using runs SQLite for the database, which after some quick error searching seems to have some issues. In particular, it throws an error when trying to email over 500 people.
This awesome GIF found here: https://www.waywardsparkles.com/technical-difficulties/
What’s more, once the post is published in Ghost there is no going back to parse and re-send the emails to smaller groups, so you have to copy and paste the entire post into a new post and re-publish in order to try and re-send email. Small inconvenience, right? Theoretically, but turns out it is particularly annoying given the way in which the text blocks work to prevent you from getting a clean version of the code from the editor, forcing you to copy the published post into a new post editor and then do a clean-up of any embeds to make sure it all works as you like—tell me again about why you love those “easy to use” block editors? They’re oh-so-easy until they’re a complete pain-in-the-ass. Sometimes dumbing-down basic web literacies in our tools does more harm than good.
Anyway, all worked out and I can now do some research to figure out how to resolve the SQLite issue before next month’s issue. And, to be fair, in the end I can stomach some of these new fangled editing tools given how focused Ghost is at being a slick, clean newsletter—but is a clean way to copy and paste a post’s code from the editor too much to ask?
This week (Wednesday) I went to pick up a mint Pleiades stand-up cabinet for the bavacade. Seeing it next to its older cousin Phoenix is really something special:
Pleiades is the fourth Centuri game to join bavacade, and I really do love their cabinets. Phoenix, Pleiades, and Challenger have nearly identical cabinets, and the control panels is an expansion of the subtler Challenger control panel:
Centuri Challenger’s control panel
Pleiades Control panel
My connection to Pleiades is linked to a gas station/deli in my home town nicknamed the Iranian Deli given it was owned by Iranians, and that was definitely a sign of the times during the early 80s in Baldwin, Long Island given the hostage crisis and a general sense of hostility with Iran that never really truly abated in the US. I would go there regularly for months in 1982 to play this game, and it was a favorite of mine. The mythos of the game got even greater for me in 1983 when I watched Nightmares, the Creepshow knock-off that had an episode starring Emilio Estevez as gamer J.J. Cooney who hustles folks to take their money so he can beat the Bishop of Battle video game at his home arcade. In fact, the name of the episode is “Bishop of Battle,” and it provides so gorgeous shots of a full blown video game arcade in downtown Los Angeles that is amazing. In fact, that is where J.J. comes all the way from the Valley to hustle some unassuming L.A. kids while playing, you guessed it, Pleiades!
Pleiades in Bishop of Battle
J.J. is locked into Pleaides with Walkman on!
Pleiades also make a special appearance in another 80s film, in fact the first of the now legendary Coen Brothers’s Blood Simple. If you look close you can see it in the screenshot below.
Admittedly Pleiades is not as central to the plot development in Blood Simple as “Bishop of Battle,” but an appearance is an appearance.
Another interesting act about Pleiades is the Marquee is spelt differently than the title programmed in the games. It’s Pleiades on the marquee and Pleiads on board. Not sure if it was a misspelling or a lack of room on the main screen, but it is an interesting quirk for sure.
The last bit of information the awesome seller of this game told me, Danielle, is that the music for this game is not on the bootlegs or Mame ROM sets available. I guess, like Phoenix, it is consider fairly interesting as an early instance of what they called “doorbell chips” that were distinct from the ROMs given they used pre-programmed chips that you might find in the melody generator of a doorbell. The technical details around this are well outside my comfort zone, but there is a fascinating forum post on KLOV about the background sound effects and music that might be of interest to some electronic sound/music nerds.
Possibly the craziest thing of all is that it is not the first Pleaides cabinet in the collection, although definitely the nicest. In December of 2020 I bought a Pleiades cocktail cabinet for $450 with a 13″ monitor on Long Island right before Reclaim Arcade opened. That game will soon be on its way to Italy with 14 other games, but that is fodder for a whole different post. YEAH!
It is with distinct pleasure that I get to announce that Tom Woodward will be running a month-long flex course on Gravity Forms throughout the month of June. Gravity Forms is a powerful form-building tool that works with WordPress, and this course will consist of weekly live sessions that will move from the basics to increasingly more complex “forms of awesome” that I understand will culminate in a form-driven database of super villains.
We will ensure you have everything you need to get up and running with Gravity Forms as part of the course, and you can actively participate in real-time on a weekly basis during the live sessions or asynchronously throughout the month in Discord. No worries if you cannot make one or more of the live sessions given both recordings and chat will be available on-demand immediately after each session, and the Discord channel will be constantly active for questions, concerns, and show and tell.
You can sign-up for this course here for $450, but keep in mind it is included—as are all our events—for anyone with an annual Reclaim EdTech subscription. So, activate your edtech powers and take the Form of Awesome flex course with Tom Woodward!
One of the things I have been doing a lot of over the last few months is talking to folks about running WordPress in Reclaim Cloud. In particular, why would you want/need to? -and how to migrate an existing instance from cPanel to the Cloud? Luckily Gordon Hawley wrote up a guide for the latter which you can find it all of its glory at Migrating a WordPress Site from cPanel to Reclaim Cloud.
For most folks WordPress will run fine within a shared hosting cPanel account. This assumes modest traffic and relatively few simultaneous authors. Specific numbers pointing definitively to when you need a bigger boat for your WordPress instance are difficult to nail down given many factors work into the equation: plugins and themes being used, traffic, media size within posts, etc. We do have a guide for troubleshooting slow sites to help folks work this out, but it can be a moving target. The benefits of WordPress in the Cloud are speed and dedicated, scalable resources so that an upper ceiling of resources can be set to withstand a sudden, large demand.
Below are a few recent instances to provide concrete examples of folks who needed to move their site from cPanel to the Cloud.
Wesleyan University’s Living a Good Life and Black Phoenix Rising
https://blackphoenixrising.us.reclaim.cloud/
I already blogged about Wesleyan University running WordPress in Reclaim Cloud to manage the demand of 3000 participants signing-up for the online course Living a Good Life. This highlights the fact when sending out an announcement for folks to register for a course the immediate demand can place a significant stress on your site, and this is a perfect use-case for having access to scalable resources in the Cloud. There is nothing worse that inviting folks to your site only to have a deluge of interest the server cannot manage. Unfortunately, this is often the case for cPanel accounts running in shared hosting when the number of active visitors gets into the 100s, whereas WordPress on Reclaim Cloud is optimized for thousands of simultaneous hits, which helps allay any concerns of managing potential resource spikes. Things worked so well for Wesleyan’s first experience with WordPress in the cloud for Living a Good Life, that they ran another minicourse, Black Phoenix Rising, in Reclaim Cloud throughout March and April.
Skidmore College’s Library Site
https://lib.skidmore.edu/
Like Wesleyan, Skidmore College has been a valuable partner to Reclaimover the years, exploring Domains, WordPress Multisite, and more recently the Cloud. Turns out they had been running the library’s forward facing site built on WordPress through Reclaim Hosting’s shared hosting service using Professional Services. This worked well for a time, but while Professional Services gets you access to a low-tenant shared hosting server, it is still shared hosting and resources are limited.* A library site for a university will have a broader demand in terms of traffic and resources, and we reached out to Michael Paulmeno who runs IT for the library and suggested moving the site to Reclaim Cloud for more stability and scalable resources. The trick to WordPress in the Cloud is that the stand-alone instance offered through Reclaim Cloud’s Marketplace is reinforced for high traffic sites running LiteSpeed as the web server that is coupled with hi-performance caching. It’s truly a performant WordPress site that takes the fear out of running institutional sites running a WordPress sites on shared hosting, something I know all too much about over the years 🙂 Needless to say, the Skidmore Library site has been running well ever since the jump to the Cloud.
University of Oklahoma’s Student Media
http://studentmedia.ou.edu
More recently we connected with University of Oklahoma’s Student Media group to host a couple of their WordPress sites they were running in an unmanaged cPanel server through Bluehost. There were some issues with performance and it has become increasingly apparent that running hi-traffic WordPress sites through cPanel is not ideal in most cases. With Reclaim Cloud WordPress in the Cloud as a performant, affordable alternative to a VPS that offers scalable resources without you needing to manage a full blown cPanel server. What’s more, not only would it be a lot easier it would most likely cost less. Fact is, if you are running a marketplace stand-alone WordPress in Reclaim Cloud the management is not that much different from running WordPress in Installatron on cPanel, the trade-off is no cPanel interface—which some appreciate—in exchange for far more reliability and speed given a dedicated container running a highly performant WordPress stack. Another interesting benefit of Reclaim Cloud for OU’s Student Media I had not considered is that an environment can be seamlessly shared and moved to non-institutional owners, which is important because OU’s Student Media acts independently from the institution. This is also the case for faculty that are part of larger grants that need independent server space that need to be able to change ownership seamlessly.
And these are a just a few, recent examples of why you might consider hosting WordPress in the Cloud, if you have even more examples let me know given I never tire of the possibilities.
Been a while bava,blog, how are you? -you beautiful piece of green web. Me, like Luther, I’ve been busy! Bit of travel to New York City, some family reunions, and sundry other obligations that have kept me away, but now I’m back!
It’s been a bit rough to get back on the blog after a couple of weeks of relative respite, but if I learned anything in making the blog donuts year in and year out it’s that time lapsed is not your friend. Blogging, to quote Mr Halloran, is about staying regular to be happy.
That’s it, now I am starting to get warmed up here. And this post is about staying regular in a sense given one of the things preoccupying me as of late has been my recent diagnosis with hemochromatosis, a genetic blood disease wherein the body creates too much of the iron protein ferritin. And while it can cause issues, particularly with the liver, it appears we caught it before any extensive liver damage, and the “cure” is simply regular bloodletting. Giving blood brings the levels down to more normal values, and in turn takes some of the pressure off the liver, which is working over time to deal with the ferritin. Antonella has been fascinated by the disease, and after doing some research and talking with a specialist here in Italy—where I might add the treatment has been amazing—turns out it is a hold-over gene from another era when Celtic warriors needed more ferritin so they could live despite tremendous amounts of blood loss, so I got that going for me should I find myself in a sword fight anytime soon.
So, I have given blood 4 or 5 times before I took a blood test to see if my levels were dropping right before I headed off for New York. I was worried my levels, which had been rising significantly over the last two years from 1300 to 1900 ng/mL, were not going to go down. [As a reference point, the acceptable range for ferritin levels are between 50-400 ng/mL.]. My fear of nothing changing was not necessarily rationale given the treatment and the ferritin levels are one-to-one by all accounts, but I’m not sure having a gene that treats me as if I am a Celtic warrior is all that rational either, so there’s that.
Anyway, the results were good, my levels dipped under 1300 to 1260 ng/mL for the first time in two years. That is a total drop of almost 700 from 1950 to 1260. With 4 or 5 more bloodletting sessions I might even get below 500 or so, which would be awesome. It seems like every half a liter of blood taken amounts to about a 175-200 drop in the levels for me.
I was relieved to think this situation might be veering towards under control. Whenever a doctor sees my levels they look at me as if I have three heads. So knowing they are going down helps put my mind at ease for something I have been meaning to deal with for at least two years, but then COVID-19 got in the way and all bets were off. The craziest part is right before COVID my sister, who is a nurse in NY, heard my levels and immediately diagnosed me with hemochromatosis, and knew exactly what the treatment was. When I finally told her I have been officially diagnosed and treatment has started she simply said to me, “what took you so long?” Fucking family.
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For most folks WordPress will run fine within a shared hosting cPanel account. This assumes modest traffic and relatively few simultaneous authors. Specific numbers pointing definitively to when you need a bigger boat for your WordPress instance are difficult to nail down given many factors work into the equation: plugins and themes being used, traffic, media size within posts, etc. We do have a guide for 
