Absolute newbie looking into DigitalOcean for WordPress

Question

Hi there,

Well it’s been many years since I last hosted a website, and in the past all I knew was just cPanel on shared hosting. Now apparently there are these newfangled terms like VPS and cloud servers…

Okay, so I’ve been looking at the packages and the forums so far and it does seem a little daunting in terms of what I need to set up myself.

So I just have a few questions…

I’m looking to host three WordPress sites on three separate domains on a single droplet. Email features should be functional.
I’m looking for a GUI web panel that is similar to cPanel, but free. I’ve looked at VirtualMin/WebMin and the interface does seem a little daunting. The things I want to do with this panel is pretty simple: basically to help me add all my domains for my three WordPress sites. As much as possible, this panel should allow me to stay free of the command line/SSH as I’m not really that comfortable with it.

Basically, I just want to be like on a shared hosting plan but with multiple addon domains. Also, for a newbie is there a difference between the various Linux distros?

Is this possible with Digital Ocean and what are the rough steps I would need to take?

Thank you

Adam Robertson · Answer

Getting email set up and working can be a bear of a job. Using Google Apps is a much easier way to go than to try and set up a mail server.It is totally possible to get a nice mail-server going, but you may want to re-think that and explore other options.Your domains can still point to your droplet for websites, and somewhere else for email. I hear what your saying about not being comfortable with command-line, but if you get over the slight learning curve, it really is much easier to manage things than trusting to a control-panel. Someone else will need to chime in on what the best control-panels are for such things, but my vote is for spending a little time learning how to SSH and SFTP into your droplet. That will end up saving you time in the long-run.

hunky · Answer

Hello, I did the same thing 4 months ago… Me too was shifting for a cPanel based web hosting and me to had to go through the same issue as yours… You are right, a control panel software is the best bet for us as control panel will install everything like, Apache, mail, php, mysql, ftp and all… Bonus is if the panel is as user friendly as cPanel… So I searched and searched a lot but frankly, there is none which is as good and simple as cPanel or DirectAdmin but what i found in my research that zPanel (now they have moved to sentora) is a panel which may be close and very easy for us who are moving from cPanel… My Setup Clean CentOS 6.5 x32 droplet with 512MB RAM and 512MB ROM… Installed zPanel on that and zPanel did the rest in configuring email and server… Once setup is done, just added the domains there, updated DNS, created a DB, restored the DB backup, uploaded the WP files (backup) and done… So give zPanel or Sentora a try…

trenzterra · Answer

Thanks! I took the plunge and tried virtualmin but it’s a little too unfriendly for me. Been a little busy lately so I destroyed the droplet for now By the way, I don’t need two way email, just one way email for lost passwords and subscriptions etc. Is it automatically configured by virtualmin or do I need to update mx records and the such?

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Absolute newbie looking into DigitalOcean for WordPress

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Absolute newbie looking into DigitalOcean for WordPress