The beginning
The suffering
In my opinion, a point in every web developer’s life comes to the point where he has to finally move out from the warm wing of shared hosting. All of the fancy pre-installed software for dealing with various tasks on the hosting have to be left behind. The so nice FTP, a protocol that every old school developer has “mastered” will be also most likely left in the warm nest.
If you have no experience with Linux, doing the switch does feel like falling. One could compare it to a bird first learning to fly but it’s much closer to falling to an endless dark pit full of sorrow, suffering and misery .
The feeling comes from all of the additional information you need to comprehend, the additional tools you need to learn to use. Learning how to actually install the software you need, deciding what your favorite (or, you could say, hate the least) text editor is for dealing with those config files. “These were the days”, you’ll think in some time…
Where DigitalOcean comes in
Luckily for everyone, there is a ton of articles and tools to help you set up whatever you might need on a server.
DigitalOcean, one of the leaders in the VPS business, should truly be noted as the real hero. Apart from offering pretty good service for the price that they’re asking, they are also trying to help all the new people there. DigitalOcean is paying people for high quality articles on various topics. These mostly include setting up various software on your brand new VPS (that does not actually need to be a DigitalOcean one). Here are a few of the, in my opinion, most popular solutions for beginners:
- Installing WordPress with nginx;
- Installing the LEMP (Linux, nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack;
- Setting up automatic Git deployment.
DigitalOcean even offers a ton of already prepared server images if you want to minimize getting your fingers dirty to a minimum.
Getting your fingers dirty the least involves the usage of some panel for your applications — most similarly as a shared hosting’s panel but you still have full control of your own server.
One of the most popular options has to be ServerPilot —it’s best option to control your PHP applications. ServerPilot allows you to create multiple apps (PHP websites) on a single server, choose their PHP version, create databases. All this without a single code line to your VPS.
The feeling that you’ve got it
Bliss
Once you have everything set up and running, the feeling of finally flying is what you get.
Your applications work smoothly.
Everything is at your control.
You have done it and you truly deserve a beer.
Post scriptum
Since this post is in no way funded by any of the services I have mentioned, I’d appreciate if you registered as my referral for DigitalOcean — https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=6e429a069010 . You also get free $10 so you can start up your VPS real fast!
