You can prepare an image in a virtual machine on your system, then import it to ours. Check out our custom image documentation here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/custom-images/

Have you tried to set up a GIT Repo and monitor your site? We use Joomla on Linux and Educon template for our school website.
I’m a high school technician and I update the materials on a weekly basis and teachers get access to quiz results (integrating them with our Moodle learning projects too to do my assignment for me).

GIThub is now a source code backup and a single place for me to view changes. I also use BibTeX bibliography formatter.