A NEW JOURNEY BEGINS...

Hiya! First post after a long hiatus...

Recently I was surveying my options for a possible change of hosting. Then I figured, why not make the move to VPS (Virtual Private Server)?

VPS aren't always cheap and easy to configure but DigitalOcean's first tier offering was still cheaper than my current Webfaction plan.

So I decided to breakdown the pros and cons of staying in Webfaction or making the jump to VPS with DigitalOcean.

So to summarize, what I'm currently looking for at this point is a cheaper way to just host my domain and keep the speed and ease of configuration. I also wanted a server as close to my location as possible (ASEAN region) so it was good both had that option.

Pricing is the most determining criteria here, as I save half of what I currently pay if I go with DigitalOcean but on the flip-side, I'd have to spend a lot more time configuring stuff on the terminal and redeploying my site.

In the end, I decided to go for DigitalOcean because I'm more of a cheapskate than I am lazy.
You also get free $5 credit after your first billing.

Because while Webfaction is great for quick deploying of web apps and CMS, most of my clients prefer to buy their own web hosting nowadays and I've found that my storage on Webfaction was rather underutilized...

Number 2, I always wanted superuser access so I could have the ability to run game or VOIP servers, I've tried it on Webfaction but didn't have much success, most probably due to the Share Hosting restrictions.

On DigitalOcean, it was quick enough to setup, all I had to was sudo apt-get install murmur (Mumble Server), do some config tweaking and I'm up and running!

The great thing about DigitalOcean's system is that each server you setup (called Droplets) you're allowed to choose the OS you want or the package you want installed with the OS.

I went with Ubuntu as I found the packages for some of the apps I need are more up to date on the distro.

What I also considered was the fact that I had a lot of emails that were stored on the Webfaction server, luckily I found a free alternative in Zoho Mail.

The free Zoho Mail account allows up to 10 users per domain and it also has a neat migration tool. It was a breeze to setup and I managed to keep my emails as it was without added cost.

I also migrated from Wordpress to Ghost which runs on NodeJS (as you can see), it wasn't smooth sailing but I managed to get everything up and running (with content imported from the old WP site).

I'm content although I had spend more time than I wanted to in the transition process. Webfaction has served me well and I might go back to them in the future, depending on use-case.

All in all, I'm glad we live in a world of so many options, I still remember back after the turn of the century when there were only a few viable web hosting options (HostGator or GoDaddy).

And if you lived through the mid 1990s, you'd know how much of nightmare Angelfire and Geocities were with broken images and Error 404 pages..