Over the last few weeks I’ve been working to move by blog over from DreamHost to DigitalOcean. First off, I’ve been using Dreamhost for nearly 10 years now, and for the price and what you get I’m still super happy with it. However, performance has been a bit slow, and I wanted the opportunity to really mess around with my own server.
With DigitalOcean, I have my own SSD Cloud Server to play around with and completely screw up. Since I’ve been doing more server provisioning, tweaking, and architecting at work I wanted to have a personal server I could muck with as I pleased.
Right now, I’m running on a pretty low-powered droplet, running Ubuntu, Nginx, PHP5-FPM, and Percona (mySQL). Ideally I’d be breaking out responsibility to multiple servers (e.g. mySQL on it’s own server) but seeing as how I probably get a total of 2 page views per day, running everything on one box isn’t going to cause issues (and I can always scale vertically).
Best part – it’s only $5 per month for a low end box. And you’re billed hourly, so if need to play around and create and tear down a droplet for a few hours it literally cost pennies. I would note that as great as this is, I would not say they’re ready for production hosting (cleint work) yet, for those instances I would recommend sticking with Rackspace or AWS.