After a month break from writing, here I am again, ready to write and publish more great content.
In my break I decided to do something big for the site, something new, something I’ve never done before and see If I was able to do it or not. If you are reading this, it means that I succeeded.
You might be asking yourself: What the hell is he talking about? I don’t see anything new!
Well that’s good, because I wanted everything to be the same, while at the same time I wanted to change something very important.
At New Year’s Eve I started the hunt for a new host for my site. After month of research, hard work, long nights, no sleeps, lots and lots of coffee, cigarets and metal music, I’m proud to say that News For Hell is Now hosted by DigitalOcean
Here’s the full story: At New Year’s Eve, I looked at my previous hosting provider, DreamHost, which FYI I was so happy with, ((no downtime, no problems, awesome support, and good price)) I was using the Shared Hosting Plan, I took the LifeHacker Promo a year ago, $20 for the first year for unlimited everything, domains, disk storage and bandwidth.
I was happy with it, it works, why change then?
Well I looked at how much disk space my site took from this “unlimited disk storage offer” and it turned out I wasn’t using much, and my traffic is not high, so why do I need to pay $10 a month for unlimited everything?
I thought if I looked for another options, I will be switching to not so good hosting providers, it turned out I was wrong, what happened is that I found the best thing ever that in the past I completely ignored.
A VPS hosting, to be more specific, DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provide one of the sweetest cloud hosting deals for as cheap as $5 a month.
At first I was a bit hesitant to switch from DreamHost because I never tried a VPS before, and I’m not a Linux expert. One of the most “common problem” I heard about DigitalOcean was that they don’t offer a high level support like other hosting providers since the server you setup will be yours and you have to manage it yourself.
Well I found out that this was wrong, How? I did that after I sent 50 email to DigitalOcean support team to help me with problems I encountered during my learning period.
Yes you read that right, 50 emails with their great support team, which I do believe that I talked to all of them, and what surprised me the most is that all my questions were answered in less than 10 minute.
- So why DigitalOcean?
# More Control
If you want to take control of your server, then DigitalOcean is the best choice for you, for example: I decided to go with Nginx instead of Apache because I’m using a 512 RAM droplet and after some research I found out that Nginx uses less resources than Apache.
Having complete control over the server that my site is running on is something I never had with DreamHost and it’s a welcome change.
# Customer Support
DigitalOcean support is amazing, It’s something I was worried about but after trying it myself I found out that there’s actually nothing to worry about.
They respond in a very short period of time and they always give you the perfect answer to whatever question you have and try their best to solve any problem you have.
# Tutorials
DigitalOcean has the best writers that you will ever find, they write tutorials about pretty much every thing that you can do with a Droplet, from running your own website to running your own Minecraft server.
And they do it multiple time based on the Linux distributions you decide to use and even its version.
# Price
DreamHost’s Shared hosting cost $10 a month with unlimited everything, taking a good look at this made me realize that I really don’t need unlimited everything, all I need is a fast cheap hosting providers that I can fully control.
While on the other hand, DigitalOcean cost $5 with complete control over your server.
# Learning
In the journey of hosting my site in DigitalOcean I created and destroyed 2 Droplets, sent 50 emails, and read more than 50 articles and visited tons of website and most important I learned a lot.
Things that I normally wouldn’t care much about since I don’t need, because let’s face it, with shared hosting you really don’t need to learn a lot. All you have to do is add your domain, change your DNS, create an email and create your MySQL database, which all can be done with couple of clicks, no tutorials needed for basic things.
Moving to DigitalOcean made me learn a lot about Linux, what LEMP and LAMP are and much much more. Now I’m more comfortable managing my VPS server and able to fix most if not all the problem that I could encounter all thanks to DigitalOcean support team and the big community that are trying their best to help each other.
# Final Words
Looking back at my decision to chose DreamHost Share hosting as a person who knows a lot about technology, I wish I have known about DigitalOcean at that time because I would definitely have picked them for their cheaper pricing and because of all the things I’ve learned from them so far.
And I definitely encourage everyone who’s starting a new blog or want to develop something and looking for the best to chose DigitalOcean