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18 Comments

Deployed the website on DigitalOcean

This was a challenge. I was stuck with GoDaddy shared hosting for a long-time, a couple of domains and working websites, mostly Wordpress CMS, comfort of cPanel, with always crappy page speeds.

And today after seeing the speed of the website on DigitalOcean, I certainly sure now; I was living on dark ages, cable modem or something same level. I'm glad I finally get out of the comfort zone and achieved this, the whole user experience is transformed to another level.

I believe Remote Jobs Center found its new home. 🏠

https://remotejobs.center

  1. 3

    Congratulations on the successful migration!

    Don't forget to turn on auto back-ups, DO makes it insanely easy and cheap. It would be a crime not to.

    1. 1

      Noted! Thank you. 🖖

  2. 2

    I’m surprised you went from capable to VPS (Droplets) so quickly! I next went from VPS to Heroku, which is also quite easy. Then once I was paying $7 each for a dozen sites, I installed Dokku on a Linode VPS, I saved a good deal of money (just $20 for 4GB and 2cpu I think, but they start at $5). Dokku is a Heroku clone (minus a web panel AFAIK) but it’s free to use on your own server. You can install free Docker images too, for databases for example. Now I use Kubernetes, which will run multiple instances of your site and balance the traffic between them. But I admit it’s quite the learning curve and can get pricey (Linode is by far the cheapest). Linode also has one-click apps, FYI.

    And then I got quite into CDNs (caches set up around the world) and may go for Fly.io edge containers for my front-ends.

    I just share what path I went down if you ever want to keep learning on the server side of things. Oh and don’t forget CI/CD :P

    But for Wordpress sites that don’t need to load at light speed in every continent... yeah best keep it simple and cheap.

    1. 1

      :) Actually divided between learning more and staying with enough information to solve my own problems. I can't know sure which tech will remain and which will automate. (like no-code wave.)

      But I know I won't stop optimizing and learning more if there are better technology and performance out there. I took my notes from your reply and will research for future developments. Thanks for the great information. 🖖

  3. 2

    Suggestion: Remove the loading screen/animation because it adds extra time and it makes you feel waiting longer

    1. 1

      You're right, there is no need to build unnecessary steps in navigation through every page. I removed the loading animation but not the preloading completely. Because when I removed, the loading is very fast so the header couldn't catch up, display menu items in weird ways first.

      So preloading website on, animation off. What do you think now? Still feeling that extra time?

      1. 1

        White preloading screen feels super weird

        1. 1

          :/ Removed preloading completely now. Check the header, you'll understand what I mean.

          1. 1

            Looks like you moved some CSS files to your footer

            1. 1

              I did no such thing man. Header just loads like that.

    2. 1

      But it does give some sense of a response at least.

      1. 2

        I mean, c'mon. Just make sure your pages load fast. I hate those loading animations

        1. 2

          Some sites still struggle with flashes of i styled text or components popping in. An animation as a band-aid while those things are fixed seems justifiable.

          Another thing is bad data-center ISPs, CDN, routing etc can mean plenty of sites load, at best, at dial-up speeds in large parts of the world. So perhaps there is a case for a loading screen there. Folks don’t think enough about, say, south east asia.

          I’m really not trying to defend the use, just discussing. I don’t use any loading animations myself.

  4. 2

    Congrats on your migration and I’m glad it worked out for you.

    FYI, these sorts of difficulties in managing WP are why many people are switching to static sites. Static sites don’t fit everyone’s use case but they are blazing fast and super simple to deploy and manage. Security and caching becomes a non-issue. I switched from WP to Gatsby and couldn’t be happier. Hosting costs went from $35/month to next to nothing. Just something to consider.

    1. 1

      Now I know what you mean by "blazing fast" 🚀After learning properly to deploy like this, next thing I want to learn is beyond Wordpess and ability to create on another system.

  5. 2

    Hi Bora. Great story and I’m glad you were able to move to a better home. Would you mind sharing what you found most challenging, moving from godaddy to DO, and what resources you used?

    1. 1

      I'm new to that technology, not properly familiar with the terms, what is droplet and how I can build a proper structure, suitable for my current system, which 10+ domains and 5-7 client business websites. Not much traffic though, but needs better performance.

      Personally I like the journey very much. Back in university I used Ubuntu for a couple of years, out of curiosity, they send me (and everybody of course) free CDs at that time. So now using terminal and sudo commands felt good. But also slow.

      I created my machines, ssh keys, my first intention is to create 2-3 droplets and divide websites. So first manually setup and install LAMP stack, on Ubuntu 18.04. And then setup various hosts for deploying multiple websites.

      But then I discovered there is a marketplace and I can quickly deploy on prepacked systems, all ready for Wordpress. Created a droplet with Plesk. Terminal and sudo commands may be felt good and required for setup, but I don't want to move slowly with all the domain and workload. Even creating a database in the command line is something.

      Before I always upload local files from FTP to the server as folders, took a great time. But then I moved to upload as zips and then extract on the server. Maybe everybody doing that already:) But it was the way I know. This time uploading also very easy.

      With a less but enough UI, Plesk do most of the job greatly; from adding domains to managing extensions, SSL, mail and many custom features to run the server behind an interface. For up to 3 domains it is free.

      Now from Cloudflare to DigitalOcean, a faster working system, providing a better user experience with improved security. I'll keep optimizing.

  6. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      😎⚡️⚡️

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