Six years ago I got tired of running my blog on a shared hosting due to downtimes and I decided to move it to a Digital Ocean droplet. Back then a droplet was 5 dollars and a couple of cents for each Snapshot. For all those six years it ran smoothly and I had complete control of all the settings and no downtime.

But it was an Ubuntu 16 server and somehow would not update to 18 and beyond. It became deprecated. I could of course just keep it, my website was running just fine. But I knew I could not keep it forever on 16 without eventual security risks. After consulting Digital Ocean support, this time I created a new droplet using their LAMP setup. For clarity, I created a 1GB RAM droplet, just like the old one.

Once created I installed phpmyadmin to move my database and replicated my WordPress website. Once I made sure my website was set up right I switched over the domain and added Let’s Encrypt SSL. And then the headache started, the droplet would crash. Turns out the MySQL server was using 40% memory. When I turned it off the droplet used 50% memory with nothing running on it but Digital Ocean’s LAMP stack.

I created a support ticket which didn’t help at all. The support engineers don’t read and just kept parroting back if I restarted the server, did I run ‘top’ command to see? No matter how many times I repeated that I run a tiny blog and that even with the blog turned off the server memory was out of control. I lost count of how many screenshots I sent them. Then the last reply from them was to just upgrade to 2GB memory. Which I did because I was bone tired of trying to figure out why it was using all the memory.

Why Digital Ocean for a tiny WordPress blog?

Someone asked me on Mastodon why I don’t just use shared hosting for a small weblog. Shared hosting has become very expensive and most if not almost all of them assume you run a weblog with more than 5000 visitors a month. And also downtimes, because more websites are on the server.

I fall in this niche category that I want a good and stable backend for my website. It’s my visiting card. I don’t blog a lot and when I do it doesn’t get thousands of hits. I don’t really promote my blog posts except for a couple of social media shares. I also have an archive of blog posts going back to 2003 when I started blogging. Those are set on private but they are part of this website.

It’s also comforting to me that I can just SSH into my droplet and add a PHP extension or fine-tune Apache or whatever. Instead of going through shared hosting support. And boy did I learn a lot about running a LAMP stack from the command line.

At the end of the day, I am paying 12 dollars for a droplet. It runs very fast and smoothly for now that I upgraded to 2GB memory. But the whole Digital Ocean support experience left me with a sour taste. So I’m keeping my eyes open for other hosting options in the same price range, one that includes server management.

A selection of screenshots

My screenshot folder is full of these. There is still something not right with the memory use. But I guess I’ll make do now with the 2GB memory and think of another solution later on.