Noob question. Should I create separate droplets for each website?

April 22, 2013 10k views
avergara08
By:
avergara08
What would be best? A single droplet with high specs containing 4-6 websites? Or 6 droplets (1 for each)?
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10 Answers
craig April 22, 2013
It really depends on how busy the sites are... I personally know people who have 50+ low traffic sites on a 2GB VPS instance (including cPanel - MySQL, Apache, Mail + DNS services).

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dsgnvictor April 23, 2013
I'm not an expert, but base system installation - MySQL, Apache, Mail etc - will eat about 200MB of droplet's memory and a few GBs of the disk so I would vote for a single, big enough droplet.
Still depends on your requirements.
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rob.vanegdom April 25, 2013
It all depends on how much traffic those websites get and what kind of content they host. You can indeed run 50 low end websites with low trafics from a droplet with 2GB that won't be a problem.
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bukhamseen.h April 25, 2013
While its depend on use case, i suggest you to get 2 medium droplet. One for Database and one for website(nginx+X)
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bukhamseen.h April 25, 2013
6 separate droplet will increase your management cost also! Think that your problem will be 6x more.
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spark2000 May 1, 2013
The short answer 'No you should not create separate droplets for each website (unless you know you have to)'.

As you ask this question it looks you haven't done any performance testing and tuning of the sites. You may start with one droplet, deploy the sites, do performance testing and tuning (6x times less configuration, administration and etc) and adjust droplet size. When finished you can decide whether it would be better for you to pay for N droplets + more administration or 1 droplet + possibly higher price in total for bigger droplet. Don't forget one droplet might be more efficient for load balancing and if you are lucky to have web site load at different time spans you 1 droplet for 1 site will fit you best.
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spark2000 May 1, 2013
if you are lucky to have web site load at different time spans 1 small droplet for all sites will fit you best.
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fuad.nahdi May 1, 2013
If you use 1 droplet for multiple websites, it means a single IP address is shared by multiple websites which are not good for SEO. Check this why a dedicated IP address is important for each site http://www.colocationamerica.com/services/why-a-dedicated-ip-address-is-important.htm
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ed June 15, 2013
@faud.nahdi Are you sure about that?

https://www.zippykid.com/2013/02/21/do-you-need-a-dedicated-ip-address-for-seo/
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tazotodua September 20, 2018

ABOUT SECURITY ! ! ! ! ! !

No one mentioned, but putting all sites together is 10x increased risk to your business! In case 1 (from all 6 sites) is hacked, then all your other sites are hacked too!

I don't know if there is a complete solution to separate domains from each-other COMPLETELY. It's not enough to restrict only sFTP user. Instead, there should be access-jails (which will restrict APACHE PHP process) to have access to upper directory files in server.
I am trying to find out if there is any way.

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  • MrMarcie May 12, 2019

    Not if sFTP is disabled. I have several sites on 1 droplet and I'm the maintainer. Clients can only login in their CMS.

    • tazotodua May 13, 2019

      i know the matter in details, so, i know what i've described is just exact. If any of your client's cms is hacked, all other files on your droplet (so all sites and databases) will be accessed simply. so...

      • MrMarcie May 13, 2019

        The CMS should not be able to access outside their own folders in /var/www/client.

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