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New droplet or droplet upgrade?

Posted on February 27, 2018

I am not yet in this situation, but it won’t be long…

I am running an Ubuntu LAMP server with a few instances of wordpress on it. As I keep getting new clients, obviously I am going to eventually need to either upgrade the current server or spin up a new one to keep the user experience acceptable. Either my Google-fu is weak today or there isn’t anyone asking this question, so I thought I’d pose it to my peers here.

Basically what I am wondering is this - is there a compelling reason to go with either a server upgrade or new server droplet - the dollars work out pretty much the same no matter what I do, so I’d like to look at it from a standpoint of performance benefit - or maybe ease of maintenance… or just whatever!

Anyone out there made this decision before?

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Jason Peters

February 27, 2018

This really is a question of preference really and what the needs of your client(s) are. With running a single droplet and all the sites in one regardless if you resize it up you are running into a ceiling in regards to performance at some point.

You may or may not see it, however if you do, say one of the sites all of a sudden begins to get tons of traffic and consumes allot of the single droplets resources, the other site(s) may also see a decline in performance.

Using two droplets would spread the load between both and only have some sites effected in the above scenario.

Another solution is to perhaps look into a distributed setup making use of something like Docker

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/5-common-server-setups-for-your-web-application

GreymanIndustries

February 28, 2018

Thank you for the response, sir… I had considered that distributed setup as well, but hadn’t yet done the research into the work I’d have to put into it. It sounds like it might be a decision best saved for when I see what’s actually causing the slowdown (i.e. bandwidth, RAM, or something else) - it’s looking like right now the LIMFAC is going to be memory - I have CPU and bandwidth to spare, but as you pointed out that could change at any time. Thank you for the link - I’m going to add that sort of solution as a possible as well.

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