MariaDB on Luis Sousa Blog

Automated WordPress Backups to Hetzner with Docker (Zero Plugins)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:08:00 +0000

We run a travel blog at joyofexploringtheworld.com on a single VPS with Docker Compose. Managed backup plugins add overhead, cost money, and only back up what WordPress can see. We wanted to back up everything—volumes, configs, database—automatically, with offsite copies. Here’s how we did it with zero WordPress plugins.

The backup service Link to heading

We use offen/docker-volume-backup as a sidecar container in our Docker Compose stack. It runs on a cron schedule, tars up the mounted volumes, and ships the archive to a remote Hetzner Storage Box via SFTP.

How We Sped Up Our Travel Blog (Without Changing Hosts)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

We run a travel blog at joyofexploringtheworld.com that helps travellers plan itineraries—hosted on a low-cost VPS with Docker Compose and Cloudflare’s free tier. Here are four changes that improved speed without changing hosts or paying for premium plugins.

1. Give the database more memory Link to heading

On a 24 GB VPS, MariaDB’s default InnoDB buffer pool (~128 MB) was too small. We increased it to 2 GB and set a 4 GB memory limit on the DB container. Redis’s maxmemory was raised from 1 GB to 2 GB.

How We Speeded Up Our Travel Blog (Without Changing Hosts)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

1. Give the database more memory Link to heading

Running a WordPress Travel Blog on a Budget VPS: The Full Docker Stack

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

We run joyofexploringtheworld.com — a travel blog — on a single 24 GB VPS using Docker Compose and free-tier Cloudflare. No managed WordPress hosting, no premium plugins, no surprise invoices. Here is the full stack, laid out so you can steal whatever is useful.

Architecture overview Link to heading

The request path looks like this:

Internet
  -> Cloudflare (CDN / APO / edge SSL)
    -> Traefik v3 (reverse proxy, TLS termination for origin)
      -> 2 WordPress containers (round-robin with sticky session cookies)
        -> MariaDB 11 (single-writer database)
        -> Redis (persistent object cache)

Alongside the main request path we run a handful of supporting services: imgproxy on a dedicated subdomain for on-the-fly image resizing and format conversion, a wp-cron sidecar that hits wp-cron.php every five minutes so we can disable the default front-end cron, an automated backup container that dumps the database and syncs uploads to Hetzner Storage Box nightly, and the Datadog agent for logs, traces, and container metrics.