Few days ago, I shared the story of my food blog, how I started getting 400,000 pageviews a month on my blog without relying on the SEO.
The server issue was the part of the story that gave me a few sleepless nights. I skimmed the internet for a better hosting company that could be reliable and scalable enough where I can move my growing blog without the fear of having to get up in the middle of the night and find out that the blog has been offline since last few hours.
Because that had already happened to me twice and believe me, it is a very terrible feeling. It was as if my heart stopped pumping blood to my body. But anyway, I’m glad that I have been hosting my food blog on Digital Ocean for the last five months, and there has never been a single issue.
What is Digital Ocean Hosting?
In this post,t I am going to talk about my experience of moving a growing blog to different hosting providers and finding Digital Ocean to be the most reliable one if you are a little technical savvy.
Digital Ocean is a cloud hosting service that uses SSD Hard Drives that was gaining popularity among publishers who want a blazing fast server for their blog. While Traditional Hosting Companies charge a premium to offer SSD Hard Drives, Digital Ocean provides SSD by default.
If you’ve read my post ‘How I started getting 400,000 pageviews a month’ I had mentioned, after finding out that I need to do something to fix the problems I was facing to scale the website, I gave myself a couple of days to find the best hosting company.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many excellent hosting services out there, but, when you are facing an issue with a hosting service where you’ve been hosting your websites for years, you start having doubts about every company that has even a single negative review.
Every web hosting company my blogger friends recommended were either rubbished by another blogger friend or some random guy on a hosting forum. I used to uncheck every potential hosting company from my list that had even a single negative review anywhere on the web.
[pullquote align=”right”] I did not find a single negative review about Digital Ocean anywhere on the web[/pullquote]
I read a lot of praise about Digital Ocean in the forums before, but I started looking for more reviews once I got the recommendation from a friend who was hosting his blog that gets more than 5 million page views per month. His blog was faster than mine, even when my website was getting just 1500 page views a month.
At this point I was sure that Digital Ocean could be my potential hosting provider, after spending some time on various forums, I did not find any single negative review that said anything bad about them, So I made my mind and chose them.
Setting up WordPress and its Performance on Digital Ocean
I signed up on the Digital Ocean website, only to find that it is a completely different world, I had been using cPanel for years, and I was spoilt with the ease of it, and Digital Ocean was completely different. I knew it was an unmanaged hosting, but I didn’t expect it to be without any visual backend at all.
Thankfully the Tutorials created inside Knowledge Base of Digital Ocean are super informative and thanks to all the people who wrote detailed guides to walk newbies through the entire process of setting up the hosting and moving my WordPress blog to it.
If you are still not sure how you can move your website to Digital Ocean, I will soon write a detailed guide for newbies who can follow the exact method I did for creating a WordPress blog from scratch or move an existing WordPress blog to Digital Ocean.
It took me an entire day to set up the blog (including to wait time for the name servers to propagate and see if everything worked properly on the blog)
It was quite a relief to see my blog running fine and smooth after a horrifying experience with the HostGator VPS Hosting.
I have been able to sleep well and be at peace (at least from the hosting part) from the last few months.
The experience with Digital Ocean is so amazing that all my other websites, which were hosted on a Shared Hosting on Hostgator, started feeling slow. I had to move them all to MDD Hosting, which is a premium shared hosting and excellent hosting service for starting up.
If any of my websites, that is hosted on MDD hosting, starts getting more traffic, I’ll be happy to move it over to Digital Ocean, because I think it is the best solution for websites with huge traffic or a very high growth rate.
Price Comparision with other VPS Hostings
You can sign up for Digital Ocean today using this link to get a $10 Off, then you’ll pay according to the plan you will select, which is pretty affordable and very reasonable compared to the competition hosting companies.
I paid $33.97 (Applicable for the first month) to get a VPS on Hostgator that kind of server on Digital Ocean is available for just $10.
ALSO SEE: My Experience with Hostgator VPS Hosting
However I didn’t opt for Digital Ocean because of it’s pricing, I was ready to pay what I would have paid to Hostgator if I would have upgraded for the next level of VPS and that is around $89.95/month $57.97 for the first month). My only concern was, a reliable host and that’s what Digital Ocean is.
[pricing_table][plan name=”Bluehost’s Popular VPS” price=”59.99″ before=”$” period=”per month” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/BlueHost/” btn_text=”More Details” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
2 CPU Cores,
60GB Disk Space,
4GB RAM,
2TB Bandwith
[/plan]
[plan name=”Digital Ocean” price=”20.00″ before=”$” period=”per month” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/DigitalOcean/” btn_text=”More Details” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
2 CPU Cores,
40GB Disk Space,
2GB RAM,
3TB Bandwith
[/plan]
[plan name=”Hostgator’s Popular (Snappy 1000)” price=”49.95″ before=”$” period=”per month” featured=”yes” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/hosting/” btn_text=”More Details” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
1 CPU Cores,
60GB Disk Space,
1GB RAM,
1TB Bandwith [/plan]
[/pricing_table]
You can check out the detailed guide to move your blog to Digital Ocean, and sign up for Digital Ocean using this link which gives you a $10 off for your first month with them.
We get a small kickback from the company, which we’ll consider as a gift from your side as a ‘thank you’ for writing this guide. Even if you don’t want to, I’ll still be happy to recommend Digital Ocean to everyone has wanted to grow their fish in a bigger pond.
