Are you looking for reliable and fasting hosting for your website? Are you someone who does not know how to manage a server? Are you someone who is willing to spend decent money on blog hosting but does not have a fund to hire a website developer? If these questions apply to you, then you are the right place. Here I discuss the best hosting solution for bloggers across the globe.
In the past, I have worked with many hosting companies like Godaddy, HostGator, SiteGround, and Godaddy VPS. Finally, I am settled with Digital Ocean. This website is hosted on Digital Ocean server.
Let me inform you upfront that this is not a hosting tutorial instead of a suggestion article. Here I discuss only basic things. After reading this article, you will understand how a reliable hosting is essential for the growth of your website. This article gives you a broad picture of WordPress blog hosting. How should you plan now to avoid issues that you may face in future?
Table of Contents
► Digital Ocean Hosting for WordPress Bloggers
Digital Ocean hosting comes with several great features, very useful for bloggers who are not a website developer. I am not saying such features other hosting company do not offer. Here I am only explaining what Digital Ocean has to offer. Digital Ocean offers thousands of advanced hosting solution. However, I limit this discussion only to those features which are essential for a WordPress website.
On Digital Ocean control panel, a user creates a droplet in one of its data centers. Your droplet is your zone, do whatever you wish to do (certainly not crossing the Digital Ocean User Agreement boundary line). Digital Ocean offers no service on how to manage a Droplet.
You can understand droplet is like your new apartment in a multi-story building. All the facilities are there in the building complex. The complex management takes cares of everything. For that, you pay every month a maintenance cost. There are rules and regulation on every matter related to your activity in the building complex, outside your flat. However, what you do inside your flat (space) is your choice. Do not be noisy or do something that might disturb people in neighboring flats.
→ Hire a Server Management Service to manage a Droplet
When you book a space/droplet in one of the Digital Ocean’s data center, you get a space on an SSD server. You need to install all the resources in the droplet. Those resources are email service, firewall, applications for better performance, website files and folders and so on.
Even a senior developer cannot set up a fully functional, secure, and fully-optimized server. You being a non-developer means, server setup is like making a rocket and then drive to the moon. A practical solution is to use service like ServicePilot. ServerPilot, RunCloud, and Cloudways are several automated server management solutions. They optimize your droplet in no time.
There is a straightforward process to connect ServerPilot to Your Droplet and allow it to manage on your behalf. Features and function of ServerPilot I will discuss in another article.
→ DO Instant Snapshot and Regular Backup
Digital Ocean offers this excellent feature wherein you can take a full backup of the entire server (or say droplet). The time required in full backup depends on the size of the server. A 50GB droplet would take about 15 minutes to backup.
This feature is essential especially when you are going to update plugin and themes. Sometimes plugin or theme update could trigger white page or internal server error 500. When you try to install a new plugin or theme that could also trigger malfunction and resulting in the website fails to load.
You being a non-developer, would be difficult to identify the reason and solve it. Therefore, the Instant Snapshot feature always comes in handy. If something goes wrong, restore the old snapshot. Your website is live again. You will not get such a handy feature in the shared hosting.
Regular Backup: Digital Ocean provides regular backup service, but it is optional and chargeable. Regular backup price is 20% of your droplet plan. Suppose 10 dollar is your droplet plan. When you enable backup, you will be paying 12 dollars every month.
If you enable backup, which you must, every week a copy of the entire droplet will be stored on the Amazon Cloud environment. Last four back-ups are always available for you to restore on one click.
→ Digital Ocean Server Uptime
To become a successful blogger the most essential thing that your website must be valued and respected by visitors. Unless you achieve the following things, you cannot become a successful blogger.
- Your website must be fast
- Always online, no downtime
- The design of the website must be user-friendly
- Also, the design of the website has to interactive
- Your website hosts content that appeals to readers
Your website is fast depending on multiple factors such as server optimization, website optimization, and network delivery optimization. I will talk about them one by one in separate articles.
No downtime is solely depending on your website’s hosting provider. HostGator downtime is five to 10 minutes every day and sometimes two hours, three hours, or a full day. Do you think your website would ever become big if downtime is like this? They claim for 99.99% uptime, but actually, uptime is only approx. 95%.
Digital ocean, on the other hand, actually ensures not 99.99%, instead of 100% uptime. There might be few seconds of downtime, but you never get to know that.
→ Hosting Cost
How much is the monthly cost of blog hosting with Digital Ocean? Here you can check Digital Ocean pricing. That is the standard price. In reality, you will have to spend more. Suppose you book 10$ droplet which comes with 2GB RAM. For good speed of a WordPress website, the droplet must have at least 2GB RAM. I am saying this from practical experience. Besides 10$ you have to pay local tax. In India, the GST rate on the IT service is 18%. Plus, you will have to pay 2$ for Weekly backups. Adding the cost of the Instant snapshot, which is 0.05 dollar per GB every month. That will also be one or two dollars.
| Plan | 10$ |
| Backup | 2$ |
| Snapshot | 1$ |
| Local Tax | 2.34$ (18% GST in India) |
| Server Pilot | 5.5$ |
| Grand Total | 20 to 21$ |
As per today’s Rupee-Dollar rate, the monthly cost would come 1400 Rupees. Digital Ocean also has a 5$ droplet plan, which is not ideal for a WordPress website. That is good for a basic HTML website. The Droplet does not have enough resources essential for the smooth operation of a WordPress Website.
One thing I can guarantee that your website would never grow in a shared hosting environment. If you are dreaming of becoming a successful blogger, buying a car and a flat from website income, you have to spend on website hosting. It is a worthy investment to grow big.
→ How to start with Digital Ocean Cloud Hosting
Digital Ocean gives 10$ credit to first time users. Use the credit to learn how to create a droplet in Digital Ocean Cloud Hosting. How to connect a droplet with ServerPilot? How to transfer files to the Droplet storage? Practice on this, become a master. Once you are entirely sure – yes, this is the way to move forward, create a droplet, install resources, and make your website live.
Learning how to host your WordPress Website with Digital Ocean would take about less than a month. Then you launch your dream website. Hiring a website developer is not a solution. Sooner or later you will have to learn how to deal with technical issues.
Server developers, in general, know one or two or five things whereas server management has seventy-five things. I am just trying to explain why you must learn server management to minimize expenditure. How many developers can you hire? Server management cost for your website will run into lakhs whereas income is zero as your website has been newly launched.
Use 10$ free credit from Digital Ocean and keep experimenting until you become an expert in server management. To get 10$ credit, you need to follow the link below.
| Digital Ocean Credit | Claim your 10$ free credit |