Web Server Consolidation

I’ve got multiple sites that I develop and host - sites for my mobile apps, my artist friend Josie’s website, my company website and other bits and pieces I’ve built over the years.

For a couple of years I’ve using A Small Orange as a hosting service. They’ve been very good, and if you’re looking for an inexpensive shared host with excellent reliability, I’d definitely recommend them.

However my yearly renewal was due, so I decided to take the plunge and move over to running my own virtual server with Digital Ocean.

I’ve been doing a lot more work on Unix systems recently, so I’m reasonably confident I mostly know what I’m doing. There are lots of useful guides at Digital Ocean to help you out, and I now have a working nginx server serving all of my sites, plus PostFix running as a mail forwarder.

I also ported my company website from a Python Google App Engine site to a static Jekyll one, and am hosting this on my own server now too.

I’m very happy I’m now in complete control of serving all my sites exactly how I want to.

Also it was quite fun setting up an Ubuntu server up from scratch exactly how I wanted it. I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago!