My new server at Digital Ocean is up and running. Ubuntu 14.04, with Nginx (LEMP stack).
Why Move?
It had been a while since I bothered much with my website. My interest in IndieWeb got me refocused on some interesting technical details and provided the extra push to get me moving.
A big decision came when I realized that my old web hosting company, which I had used for years, didn’t support SNI, and probably wasn’t going to anytime soon. This meant moving a few WordPress sites and a couple Rails and Flask projects, and that was going to be a bit of work. I’ve been doing *nix system administration for about 3 decades, so I wasn’t worried about getting stuck, but I also had a pretty good idea of the time and work involved.
Nerding Out
I looked quickly through the hosting recommendations at IndiewebCamp.com and did a little up-to-date checking of the particulars. It was a close decision, but I ended up going with Digital Ocean — partially because of their great documentation and active community.
I chose Ubuntu mostly because I had already set up a small home projects server on an old PC with Ubuntu 14.04, and it made sense to stick to the same until I had some compelling reason to do something different.
My knowledge of Apache is not up-to-date, so I was facing a learning-curve no matter what I did. And Nginx seemed to be popular for a lot of reasons that made sense for my situation. It’s light-weight, flexible and configurable, and the Digital Ocean docs seemed comprehensive on topics from basic LEMP stack setup to nitty-gritty topics like OCSP Stapling. So I dove in.
The basic setup to get the server configured, the LEMP stack in place, and my home site and main wordpress sites running took only a few hours, spread over a saturday afternoon and a few evenings. I flipped the DNS to the new server and was running.
The fancier stuff took a while longer. In calendar time, it’s been about a month, but I only worked on this a couple evenings a week.
The Results
I now have my own blog, my cooking blog, and our family site (which I created while learning a bit about BootStrap and HTML5/CSS3) all running and even getting an A+ rating on the Qualsys SSL test for all the domains.
Next Steps
I haven’t decided whether to setup my Rails and Flask experiments on this server, since I now have the little home server for that kind of thing. And I have a to finish moving the posts from an old business site into my personal site under a post category. But mostly, I’m just looking forward to getting back to this kind of writing and continuing my experiments with IndieWeb stuff.