Completely new to this, and have few questions before comitting

October 28, 2015 2.5k views
Getting Started DigitalOcean Control Panels WordPress Security Scaling Linux Basics CentOS
andy96e424d292b
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andy96e424d292b

I have had a look at the Digital Ocean tonight and it seems ok, albeit a little daunting due to being new to this sort of thing(only used hosting from Arvixe, via cPanel), but from guides i reasonably quickly got a ‘dummy’ version of my site going as a trial reasonably quickly, much to my surprise! Although i appreciate i haven’t got a email server ‘installed’ or loaded SSL etc, so its not excatly how my current site it, but as a test i would class it as a success and was encouraging.

Can i just ask a couple of questions?

  1. If i went this route and once all my sites are running, would i have to do any ‘maintenance’ to it. Or once it is set up, its set up for good and in theory i would not have to do anything…?? Just like i would with my current host?

  2. Can i run more than one website on a single droplet? Currently i installed the Wordpress Droplet as one of my sites is Wordpress. However the other site isnt wordpress, so i assume i would have to set it up different..?

  3. I have seen you can install panels like things called sentora and vesta which i guess would make it more like im used to. Is there any benefit to doing it this way, apart from visually making it easier for me to set things up, as have no real knowledge of setting up servers?

  4. Security, would i have to do anything to make it secure, or is it secure out the box?

  5. How easily could i(if needed) scale up my droplets?

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1 Answer
MDS October 29, 2015

Welcome to DigitalOcean!

1) Once you have everything setup and configured, you are all set. Specially with a setup such as Lamp stack, which does not require much maintenance once it's setup. But it is a good idea to check back once in a while to make sure everything is running and is up to date.

2) You can run multiple website from the same droplet. There is a great tutorial available on how to do it here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-centos-7

3) This is a personal preference, I personally don't use any control panels and find it limiting. But they are also a great way to start hosting your own websites. Running multiple sites is easy if you have a control panel setup such as vesta.

4) DigitalOcean has good out of the box security. Few things that you can do is,

  1. Setup SSH keys: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-centos-7
  2. Change your SSH port to something unique.
  3. You can find other security released tutorials here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/security?type=tutorials

5) One of the main advantages of using cloud hosting is the scalability. Scaling to a larger package or scaling to multiple droplets can be easily setup.

Initial Server Setup with CentOS 7
by Mitchell Anicas
This tutorial explains the first steps you need to take after creating your CentOS 7 server, including how to login with root, change the root password, create a new user, give the new user root privileges, change the SSH port, and how to disable root login in.
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  • andy96e424d292b October 29, 2015

    Thank you @MDS For taking the time and providing very helpful replies to my questions. I will have a look through the links you provided.

    • MDS October 29, 2015

      No problem at all, happy to help! :)

      • andy96e424d292b October 30, 2015

        Hello again @MDS, following on from my previous comment i have a further query.

        Background of what done - I have chosen the droplet which provides, 2GB Ram 30GB SSD Disk($20/pm), and have done a fresh install, and installed my website through ServerPilot. After looking, this seemed best of both worlds, in terms of setting up.

        With ServerPilot, i used the Wordpress installer, then migrated my current site, to the new DO server. (currently using a 'test' web address not, but real one, but wont make a difference. .

        I have also activated cloudflare, on the new DO site also

        Questions
        When i run a GTMetrix speed test on my two sites, which are the same, although on different servers, the results are different, with the site hosted on DO being 1.2s slower on page load time. What reason could this be that excatly same website has different speeds?

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