Any Digital Ocean users?

tye · 2014-05-01 01:40:59

What specs is everyone running their VPS at?

I’ve got one Future Host which I’m quite happy with using:

BW: 3,000GB
RAM: 1,000MB
Hardrive: 50GB

But I was looking for something smaller for some personal sites but wondered about performance.

Marc – is that uptime list the benchmark as my host isn’t even on there :)

Gocom · 2014-05-01 02:04:54

Without no real optimisation, the smallest DigitalOcean droplet we have can handle about 80 million page views a month with a pretty heavy Textpattern website — according to benchmarking. The website does 5 heavy look ups to articles table per page, where the table contains 5 additional blob columns and 3000 rows, and in addition the site loads megabytes of custom code as plugins.

The only actual optimisation is byte code caching, but it doesn’t do shit to help Textpattern as Textpattern’s plugin are in a database, run with eval(), and page templates are processed with regular expressions and use dynamic calls. There is nothing other there to cache pages or help with the load. It’s old Textpattern system that doesn’t use our Composer installer, which would solve plugin source byte code caching issues as the installer stores plugins in real files.

You can get quite far with event the smallest amount of resources.

Last edited by Gocom (2014-05-01 02:06:55)

jstubbs · 2014-05-01 08:31:52

Jukka, what would you recommend as a plan on DigitalOcean for 6 TXP sites with normal traffic? On Gandi, I found I had to add a 2nd core to stop constant page loading errors (random blank pages which you mentioned above).

And – which distros would you say are worthwhile? You mentioned Ubuntu gives poor performance on a 512MB RAM droplet. For TXP sites, I guess we’d be looking at Ubuntu and a LAMP stack.

Somewhat related, has anyone got experiences with email services? I use Gandi for email and its ok, but thinking of using something more robust and secure for a business site.

Gocom · 2014-05-01 09:34:05

jstubbs wrote #280521:

random blank pages which you mentioned above

That might also be a sign of poor software configuration, which is then causing the web server to crash.

And – which distros would you say are worthwhile? You mentioned Ubuntu gives poor performance on a 512MB RAM droplet. For TXP sites, I guess we’d be looking at Ubuntu and a LAMP stack.

Ubuntu works just fine with that amount of memory. I was just saying that about software configuration. You can run even bigger sites on a small VM, but it means benchmarking the server and configuring the software accordingly.

tye · 2014-05-01 23:19:55

Thanks Jukka…. I’m gonna give DO a go – its only my sites… I mean, come on, what can go wrong ;)

maruchan · 2014-05-02 16:47:07

tye wrote #280514:

What specs is everyone running their VPS at?

I’ve got one Future Host which I’m quite happy with using:

BW: 3,000GB
RAM: 1,000MB
Hardrive: 50GB

But I was looking for something smaller for some personal sites but wondered about performance.

Marc – is that uptime list the benchmark as my host isn’t even on there :)

The main specs the providers give don’t matter as much to me as things like practical, day-to-day uptime, support turnaround time, customer communications, etc. Bandwidth is almost a throwaway number at this point, RAM won’t usually be a big deal unless you are running a completely wild WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal site and don’t want to configure things, and disk space really just depends on your needs or your clients’ needs.

No matter who you end up with, I really recommend using a third-party monitoring service. I use Are My Sites Up. I have a VPS with a very highly-rated web host right now that is absolutely terrible in terms of uptime, and I wouldn’t know it without some sort of monitoring.

The benchmark list at that site only applies to people using the paid monitoring service. But that’s a good sign to me—they are paying a third party to monitor their own performance, and they are willing to share the numbers even though competitors show up there too.

Gocom · 2014-05-03 03:42:40

maruchan wrote #280555:

No matter who you end up with, I really recommend using a third-party monitoring service.

Third party monitoring services that merely just do HTTP HEAD requests every n minutes do only catch that once in a n minutes error. Monitoring service will mainly only see actual crashes and longer reachability issues. Now, if such periodical check consistently reports your site being down more than, let’s say, once a month, it’s more of so that your visitors are getting error pages more than that.

In addition to using monitoring service, you may first want to run a log/service notification service on your server itself to track Apache errors and the service uptime. You can track the actual server uptime and status by asking Apache service:

$ service httpd status

There are tools to monitor service status, and tools specifically built for Apache. One could use Monit and set it up to send “Wohoo Reddit front page — fuck me” notifications when server load reaches certain threshold.

jstubbs · 2014-05-04 03:43:14

OK, took Jukka’s advice and moved 6 TXP installs yesterday to a new DigitalOcean droplet.

It does take a while to figure things out – the main steps are to create the virtual hosts and domain.com directories, then rsync files over from the old server. Also have to install phpMyAdmin and very importably mod_rewrite.

Now that the sites are in place I switched the IP addresses on Clouflare and bingo, all set up. The droplet is located in Singapore and I’ve found so far that the sites load much quicker – TXP Tips for me is really snappy.

With Gandi I was paying maybe US$35 a month and it’s been a bit slow – the DigitalOcean droplet is 512MB and only US$5 a month! I’m very pleased with the results – thanks Jukka!

Helpful links:

Setup Apache Virtual Hosts – note Step 2, if you don’t grant permissions your sites will show up blank!

Setup mod_rewrite – note that you need to set AllowOverride All in the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file to allow an .htaccess file to override the standard configuration.

Setup phpMyAdmin – I didn’t follow the security settings as phpMyAdmin seems to be the latest version.

For rsync – I used something like this to move all files over from Gandi to DigitalOcean:

rsync -azv --progress /srv/d_mydisk/www/txptips.com/htdocs root@my_DO_IP_address:/var/www/txptips.com/public_html

Maybe should write up a TXP Tip for all this.

jstubbs · 2014-05-04 03:52:44

For anyone wanting to try DigitalOcean, there is a current coupon code DODEPLOY available for US$10. That’s what I used – enough for 2 months free hosting ;)

bici · 2014-05-04 05:29:45

jstubbs wrote #280575:

For anyone wanting to try DigitalOcean, there is a current coupon code DODEPLOY available for US$10. That’s what I used – enough for 2 months free hosting ;)

Signed up. And i can already see that is going to be painful to setup my free hosting ;-) But I will enjoy the learning curved.

jstubbs · 2014-05-04 10:06:59

To be honest, it is a bit of work but entirely enjoyable. As Jukka said, its your own server and its kind of fun to create and manage it. Besides, if something goes wrong you can probably do something about it rather than wait for someone else to fix it.

Jukka, one thing I did notice with the TXP installs after migration is that Diagnostics reports that Files, Images and Tmp are not writable, but each folder is set to 755.

I saw the same thing after migrating from TextDrive to Gandi, then the error notice disappeared after a while. Any idea about this?

jstubbs · 2014-05-04 10:09:33

Diagnostics also reports that the following extensions are not enabled:

The following PHP functions (which may be necessary to run Textpattern) are disabled on your server: pcntl_alarm, pcntl_fork, pcntl_waitpid, pcntl_wait, pcntl_wifexited, pcntl_wifstopped, pcntl_wifsignaled, pcntl_wexitstatus, pcntl_wtermsig, pcntl_wstopsig, pcntl_signal, pcntl_signal_dispatch, pcntl_get_last_error, pcntl_strerror, pcntl_sigprocmask, pcntl_sigwaitinfo, pcntl_sigtimedwait, pcntl_exec, pcntl_getpriority, pcntl_setpriority,

I think we can live without those, correct?

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#13 2014-05-01 01:40:59

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#14 2014-05-01 02:04:54

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#15 2014-05-01 08:31:52

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#16 2014-05-01 09:34:05

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

jstubbs wrote #280521:

#17 2014-05-01 23:19:55

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#18 2014-05-02 16:47:07

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

tye wrote #280514:

#19 2014-05-03 03:42:40

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

maruchan wrote #280555:

#20 2014-05-04 03:43:14

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#21 2014-05-04 03:52:44

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#22 2014-05-04 05:29:45

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

jstubbs wrote #280575:

#23 2014-05-04 10:06:59

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

#24 2014-05-04 10:09:33

Re: Any Digital Ocean users?

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