I've decided to move this blog. Whether I'll do it is another matter. After yesterday's suggestion by Barman, I began to look around for the best alternative to my current webhost. When I started with them many moons ago, they had relatively uncrowded servers but recently it's reached a point where it doesn't make sense paying what I pay for such a slow website response. The last time I looked, there were over 100 websites on this server, which just seems crazy and probably accounts for the frequent downtime and very slow page loads. I still thought a VPS was beyond me but yesterday I discovered digitalocean.com.
I'm still undecided whether I'll use them instead of the company Barman suggested. For a ridiculously good price of 5$ a month, I get to create a 'droplet' on their cloud. A droplet is just 1 core processor, 512mb of memory, 20gb of disc space, 1tb of transfer, but it looks like it's already going to be *much* faster than what I currently have. The downside is that it's pretty much me on my own learning to manage my own server. I don't even have a control panel, unless I want to install one myself and that's not so easy and not generally recommended by the Linux gurus. Yes, it's running on Linux and as I discovered yesterday, doing even the simplest thing demands a steep learning curve. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if I don't eventually make the move, the 5$ is actually a really good price just to have access to a Linux install I can play around with and learn to manage a web server. It's something I've never done but always wanted to try.
So now I've installed Ubuntu Linux on my 'droplet', which is effectively a remote computer which I access through shell or console. If I want to do anything, I have to do it with a command typed into the Linux shell. After a long day, I finally had this website up and running over there about 4am yesterday morning (fast to load, new theme makes it look like a new start) but today I face the not so easy job of moving everything else associated with it. Only if I'm 100% certain it will be easy to manage will I redirect my domain name over there.
It works!
ReplyDeleteWell done you!
LOL. This bit works but we'll have to see how it works once I get the domain name propagated and I try to move subdomains and email... Probably back at the old place on Monday if is all goes bad. ;)
ReplyDeleteIt just takes a while and you have to be patient is all....
ReplyDelete...it is a nerve wrecking time waiting for all the servers to update though!
So, why wouldn't you put Cpanel on the droplet....?
Costs a fortune for the proper Cpanel. There's a free ZPanel but there's something going on with the team making it which means that it's not been updated for a long time. Hopefully, once I get used to how to do things, in theory it's not too difficult to edit the files via the command line. The problem is when things go wrong, such as the past 10 minutes when I tried to add a second website to the account... :(
ReplyDeleteOh, I didn't realise it was expensive!
ReplyDeleteLOL. I know. I now see why many webhosts don't offer it but give some strange (often inhouse) alternatives. Crazy that cPanel is $20 a month when the actual hardware is so cheap.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I've now installed two websites on the server using two different domain names. If I can now figure out how to do subdomains, I'll be about 90% of the way there. ;)
Cool!
ReplyDeleteSo $20 per month must be for multiple use then...?
I'm only paying Gray €1.99 per month and have full cPanel access....
For users, it's per server, I think, but they'll have discounts for companies using it as their stock panel. I know I'll miss it, especially the webmail/email configuration which was so easy.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the URL has changed to the new site!
ReplyDeleteVery strange. It's now 2pm on Sunday (24 hours after I changed the nameservers over) and they're still not working here my corner of the UK. I guess Cyprus must be closer to the center of the cyber-connected global village than me. ;)
ReplyDelete