At the beginning of the year, there was a monstrous downtime at my host that was the final straw. I has a VPS there for a little over 2 years, and while at first it was rock solid and awesome, it had become less reliable through the summer of 2015. There were several down times, that were resolved with a reboot, or restarting the Apache server, or the mysql server.
Not too big of a deal.
Then the week between Christmas and New Years, the wheels came off at A Small Orange hosting. The VPS service there was by and large down.
When it came back up, I was out of there lickety split.
My destination: Digital Ocean
Instead of a well provisioned VPS, where the configuration is pretty robust, fully provisioned with a firewall, WHM and CPanel built in, you get a very basic server, called a “droplet”. You can select the OS, and even do a lot of one click installs. LAMP, LEMP, WordPress, and many more options are preconfigured out of the box.
I spun up two droplets, one a preconfigured WordPress installation (my main tralfaz blog), and then a blank droplet which I used the excellent serverpilot to create three simple wordpress blogs. Smooth process.
One other benefit of Digital Ocean is their YUUUUUUUUGE collection of simple, granular articles to help people who are not super technical to get a clean, secure installation.
Even if you are not a geek, you can get:
- A clean ubuntu installation
- Setup SSH with secure key authentication
- Remove root SSH login (for safety)
- Configure a UFW firewall with only the ports needed open
- Install and harden a mysql installation
- and much much more…
For as little as $5 per month per droplet, you are good to go.
Oh, did I mention that they have wicked fast data servers in many geographical regions?
So far, 100% uptime for 30 days.
