I have been using DigitalOcean for the last three years. I am pretty happy with their service. Of late, I found that my website takes a tad too long to load.

Reasons for migration #

• My old server ran Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It is no longer supported by Canonical
• The machine had only 0.5 GB of RAM (which might explain the slow response). DigitalOcean now provides 1 GB of RAM and an additional 5 GB of HDD space for the same price.
• I wanted to setup a cost-effective backup system. I was using snapshots to keep a hibernated copy of the machine.
• The server had a lot of test junk that occupied unnecessary space, which in turn got backed up and costed me money.

My backup system based on snapshots wasn’t that good either.

• I created manual snapshots every now and then. At any given point of time, I had at least two snapshots to fall back on.
• Since snapshots are billed by their size, I was paying couple of dollars on the snapshots alone
• I would occasionally do a mysqldump of the databases to sql files.

Current configuration and backup mechanism #

• My current configuration is a 1 CPU-1 GB RAM-25 GB HDD virtual machine running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. I am comfortable with LAMP on Ubuntu and saw no reason to change.
• There is a snapshot of an initial configuration with all the websites running. In case the machine misbehaves, I can always re-instantiate the machine
• I have bought a 10 GB block volume storage that is specifically dedicated to site backups.
• A daily cronjob dumps a gzipped archive of my site directories—including the codebase—and their corresponding mysqldumps.