As a Windows user and WordPress developer, I used to develop websites on my local machine using WAMP (Windows Apache, MySQL, and PHP). This turns my computer into a server so I can run a database and everything that’s associated with a WordPress powered website.
But WAMP was slow. It was supposed to be fast given the fact that this was all local files. After hours online searching for how to speed it up, it often led to me tweaking WAMP config files to no avail, and worse, changing system files in Windows 10 which I wasn’t too comfortable with.
Also, WAMP required that you install it to the root of your C drive instead of anywhere you wanted. Well, I use Google Drive to backup important files. So now I had to manually copy my database .sql files to somewhere in Google Drive in order to back things up. Now, of course, there were tutorials on how to install WAMP to Google Drive, but these just didn’t work for me and again, it involved me changing system files which I wasn’t comfortable with.
Instant WordPress
Then I was led to Instant WordPress. IWP is a local server environment built especially for WordPress. It doesn’t need to be installed to your C drive, it can be placed anywhere.
Note: Where ever you install it, don’t install it within a Google Drive folder, Dropbox or another backup folder because it seems to mess up the installation and make it unusable. I initially installed in my Google Drive folder, but after trying to back it up the installation had errors I had to correct manually. After fixing them and backing up again, the same problem.
It’s fast too. Pages load about the same time as they would as if I was working with a server online. The great thing is, I can install this on a thumbdrive, and work even if I didn’t have my own computer.
I can actually install it as many times as I want, but the only downside to this is it being that each server install is about 400MB on top of the WP websites files. So I’ve decided to just use one install with multiple WP installations within it. The other downside is it doesn’t support Multi-site, but that’s not a need of mine and I could always use my WAMP server for that.
So this works great for me. I’m glad to be led to Instant WordPress.
Check out instantwp.com for more information.