Hosting on Digital Ocean?

Hi Igor,

Droplets are just the name of a Digital Ocean instance. So you'll always be working from a droplet, it's just the name they give their cloud servers - you can have as many droplets as required. When you sign up, you choose your operating system and any pre-installed packages, such as LAMP - as you mentioned above. I went with Ubuntu and installed LAMP - although don't worry too much if you miss something you later need — their documentation is pretty extensive so you will always be able to find tutorials on installing packages.

LAMP will enable you to get Perch up and running really quickly. I'd advise you search google on setting up a virtual host for digital ocean, as this is how you will setup new websites. Each new site will be a new virtual host. Most tutorials give you everything required to get a site up and running.

At one point I had 3-4 Perch sites running off my droplet without any issues, I now use a slightly different setup because I installed a GUI for managing my droplet, called Webmin.

I hope this is helpful. Like I said above - Google really is your friend when it comes to digital ocean. You can literally get most things done if you're new to self managed systems.

Great advice Mat! Thanks!

I've used DO directly on an occasional basis for some time but I've just discovered Cloudways. They use DO as a host but provide a managed control panel on top. I'm trying it out as it has a Let's Encrypt wizard for free SSL certificates and with a base droplet at $5/month it is very competitive. Like dealing with DO directly there is a free trial period.

There is also Serverpilot who provide a control panel that works on top of DO. I've not used this but again looks interesting.

I've run some performance monitoring on a small perch site on DO for a month or so and it was comparable with other similarly sized traditional VPSs I've used.