Why does the one-click wordpress install needs 30GB disk space

December 29, 2015 6.4k views
One-Click Install Apps LAMP Stack WordPress
strgg
By:
strgg

Hi

DO has a one-click install for wordpress which is only available for the 1GBram/30GBssd plan.

I am curious why this is the case since if i would install LAMP on ubuntu myself it will work with the 20GBssd space easily.

Questions:

  1. Does DO one-click install for wordpress uses more space than if i do a manual install with ubuntu on LAMP for worpress?
  2. How much disk-space is available after the one-click install of wordpress on a 30GBssd?
  3. Is there another advantage if i do it manually than the opportunity to run it on a 500mb/20GBssd? Is the one-click install unproper?
  4. Do i still need to configure sendmail and curl (PHP) after the one-click install?
  5. Is there a reason why a CENTOS one-click install is not provided yet?
  6. I am using atm 12GB disk space for 8 tld-domains with 250mb ram on a shared host since 4 years. Do you really advise me to start with the 1GB plan?

Thanks for your time .... and wisdom numbering your answer like above.

Regards,

Stevan

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3 Answers
eris MOD December 30, 2015

Hi Stevan,

We've restricted the WordPress one-click to the 1GB/30GB droplet not because of any storage limitation, but instead for memory reasons. WordPress running on Apache/MySQL tends to use a lot of memory, and 512mb isn't always enough. In order to ensure a smoother experience for users using the one-click, we've restricted it to only be usable on the 1GB droplet, or larger.

The WordPress one-click isn't all that different from deploying WordPress yourself: we just did most of the work for you. It doesn't use any additional space (about 1.8GB is used by the OS, supporting libraries, and WordPress itself), has sendmail pre-configured, and is pretty much ready to use out of the box. php5-curl isn't included, but it's not a direct dependency for WordPress either.

When you deploy your own WordPress install, you can optimize it specifically for your needs, use a stack other than LAMP, and deploy it on the smaller, 512mb droplet. It's just a bit more work on your part.

All of our One-Clicks are based on Ubuntu LTS releases, since most users are familiar with Ubuntu. We haven't seen much demand for other distros used as the base for one-clicks, and when we had other distros as bases, they mostly went unused. You may want to check out our GitHub repository for User-Data Scripts, however. It contains additional scripts you can use at Droplet creation to deploy different applications and stacks to a Droplet using the distribution of your choice. Here's the WordPress script for CentOS 7, for instance.

Finally, if you feel more comfortable using a 512mb droplet, you can absolutely do so. We recommend the 1GB one since we've seen better performance with at least 1GB of memory, but it's really up to you. However, keep in mind that you cannot really compare a VPS to a Shared host. A VPS (like our Droplets) has a lot more overhead, since you're running an entire server.

I hope that helped clear things up! Let me know if I missed anything. :)

Best,
Eris
Platform Support Specialist

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  • psilocybe1 January 16, 2018

    Hi Eris,

    With the recent update to the droplets, 5$ plan now provides 1GB of memory and 25 GB of disk. In line with reasonings that you provided, basic assumption that this policy will also be updated.

    Is that is the case, and if it is how soon can we expect it?

    thanks in advance,
    my kindest regards

strgg December 31, 2015

Hi Erin

Thanks for your serious response!

You say that it is because of RAM and it obiously is but on the "create droplet" page if you select the 5$ plan and hover over the one-click install from wordpress it states "please select a disk size of at least 30gb" which is kind of mishinting to the real reason.

The second question left is why don't leave the RAM issue with wordpress to the user, for most microblogs it would be sufficent.

thanks for the link to the centos!

Can we somehow compare a shared host's RAM to a VPS's RAM considering the overhead you mentioned?

Thanks for your time and knowledge
:) Regards

Reply
  • ryanpq MOD January 4, 2016

    @strgg We will be updating the language on the create page at some point. Right now the notice shown there is the same one used on the snapshots page where size is the limitation.

    For a long time we allowed WordPress one-click images to be deployed to all droplet plans. Unfortunately, MySQL with a default configuration along with the rest of the LAMP stack would often crash a couple days to a week later. Droplets do not have swap space by default so when a process runs out of memory like this it will crash. There are steps that can be taken to optimize MySQL better for the smaller droplet size but we try to avoid doing any customization of the software and services deployed on a one-click beyond basic setup. This leaves you with Ubuntu standard configuration settings whenever possible allowing for much easier troubleshooting later on.

    It is possible, however to launch a WordPress 512MB droplet without doing a manual setup by using a user-data script. You can simply paste the content of the script into the user-data box on the create page (check the option for user-data to open the input). You would then select the appropriate base image and the script will configure everything for you when it first boots.

    User data scripts

    There are also user data scripts available for WordPress on newer non-LTS ubuntu releases and scripts for WordPress on LEMP (Nginx, MySQL, PHP).

druwejeroen December 27, 2016

@eris "Wordpress 4.7 on 16.04" is now available for the first plan, why does this differ? Thanks in advance!

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  • eris MOD December 28, 2016

    We've decided to add a few security enhancements to the new WordPress image. This includes built-in fail2ban on the xml-rpc endpoint. One issue that many wordpress blogs face is bruteforcing on that endpoint, and this measure prevents that.

    In the past we've had more of an attitude where a one-click should simply provide the application included, but since WordPress was constantly running out of memory due to attacks, we added these security measures to make the one-click more usable.

    I still don't recommend running WordPress on a 512mb droplet for a popular blog -- or at least not without further optimization. However, it will work when there's not much traffic.

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