Mail + WordPress hosting

April 22, 2014 3.7k views
stijn
By:
stijn
Hi, I've been trying and testing all kinds of setups on DO for a while now but still can't decide how to setup my server(s)...I'm sure you guys can guide me in a good direction... I'm a webdesigner/developer who wants to provide web and mailhosting for his clients. Sites will be mainly wordpress. Hope you guys can help me or guide me to some tutorials: 1: seperate server/droplet for wordpress and mail or one big? What droplet config should I use (for both) 2: Wordpress server: is nginx+php-fpm the best practice? 3: Should I use a control panel of any kind? Any recommendations (for mail and/or web)? Or is it manageable from command line only? Further I would like to provide some kind of webmail and statistics/website as I would like to know how much any website uses for bandwith and system resources. I have some experience in virtualmin and I find it interesting but I uses quite some resources (nginx + mail + ftp, 2 websites already went up to almost 500mb on a Ubuntu 12.04 x64 system) Many more questions but we'll start here... :)
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4 Answers
asb MOD April 22, 2014
Generally, I'd suggest separate droplets for mail and Wordpress. I find that keeping them separate make them easier to manage. You don't have to worry about making a change to one component and breaking another. You also don't have to worry about them competing for resources. If one of your sites has a big traffic day, you don't want that to effect your webmail front end.

For the Wordpress server, I'm partial to nginx though Apache is obviously a well tested and proven option. I don't think you can go wrong either way. Just use what you are most comfortable with.

I also won't recommend a panel for most things. Sometimes panels, in their attempt to provide simplicity, end up just hiding what is really happening and make problems harder to debug. Though for mail, iRedMail might be worth looking into. It makes things pretty simple, setting up the backend and providing both a webmail frontend and admin panel.
sianios April 22, 2014
My suggestion is: 3 different droplets, 1 for the mails, 1 for the wordpress and 1 more for the database.
larry April 22, 2014
Definitely separate them.
I'm running a 1GB droplet just for e-mail. I started with a 512 MB droplet, but even with a light load, ClamAV and Spamassassin were causing so much memory swapping that they were either passing messages straight through because of the delays or they were just crashing because of the lack of memory. The 1GB droplet runs well, with very little swapping to VM. I'm using Virtualmin to manage it, but if I had to do it again, I'd probably go with something lighter. Virtualmin is a lot just to manage e-mail.

stijn April 23, 2014
Thanks for the information, very valuable!

What config should I use?

Larry suggested 1GB, is that enough for iRedMail or maybe 512 will do?

What for the wordpress droplet? 512, 1GB or higher?

And for the fun of it, let's say I make 3 droplets, 1 for the db too, what about that one?
I suppose you mean the website databases, not the mail db?
(and how do I connect the wordpress to the mysql droplet, probably just ip and username based?)

Looking forward to your comments!
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