Clarification for a Beginner: Power of Digital Ocean vs Ease of DreamPress

Question

Hi,

I am going to start a Wordpress blog that I eventually want to generate revenue through a few ads, affiliate marketing and a Shopify store. If anyone would like more details on what I’m doing so they can give me a better answer, let me know.

From what I am reading Digital Ocean seems like a much better and powerful tool, however I have zero experience in dealing with what I am reading about in the tutorials.

I would love to learn how to use Digital Ocean. My concern is how much time it would take as I run a business already. If I could learn how to create/manage a site through DO spending 2-3 hours a day I would do it and enjoy it a lot I think. But if it would be more of a full time job spending 6-8 hours a day I can’t commit that much time to it now.

In your honest opinion would it be better for me to start with a plug and play option like DreamPress until I generate enough revenue I can hire someone to use DigitalOcean for me?

Does that sound like a heads up plan for someone in my position? Or would it potentially create more issues down the line as the methods I end up using in DreamPress may need a massive overhaul in a switch to DO?

Thanks.

JonsJava · Accepted Answer

DO is a powerful solution (similar to AWS EC2 instances). With that said, you receive un-managed hosting – which means:

you install all the software yourself
you are responsible for updating your server to keep it secure
you are responsible for ensuring that it is configured correctly
if you run into an issue, you hit up the Q&A to receive community support (I don’t work for DO)

I’m a DevOps engineer, so Linux is my thing. For someone who just wants it working? I’d recommend leaving it to the pros, and fire up a droplet to play around with it in your spare time, while hosting your site at a managed provider.

Race car drivers hire mechanics and a pit crew. If this is a personal site that is for fun, I’d say by all means do it yourself – you’ll learn a lot. Because it’s a professional site, I say don’t go that route until you have a firm grasp on how to handle all aspects yourself, or you hire someone to do it for you.

Sleepeasies · Answer

Thank you for the reply. I decided to go with Serverpilot. So it’s up and running already, which probably would not have been the case if I’d decided to do it on my own.

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Clarification for a Beginner: Power of Digital Ocean vs Ease of DreamPress

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