vNotions Logo LargeThose that frequent the site regularly will have noticed quite a few changes recently. I’ve migrated the blog from wordpress.com to a hosted wordpress site and the name has also changed from virtualnotions to vNotions. I wanted to get more control of the site and be able to develop it over time into something else as it continues to grow and develop. WordPress.com is excellent as a free resource but I wanted to be able to customise more.
I really wasn’t sure what the best hosting solution would be as there are a number of options. There’s managed, managed hosted, virtual private server (VPS) and also the option of running wordpress in AWS. I turned to twitter to see if anyone had any recommendations for hosting wordpress. The first reply came from Mike Andrews (@trekintech) and I have to thank him for the recommendation. I had a look at a number of different providers and settled on DigitalOcean which was put forward by Mike. DigitalOcean have a strong community forum and supporting documentation so it was very easy to get everything set up. Each VPS in DigitalOcean is called a droplet and it’s very quick to deploy a new server instance. I stumbled across ServerPilot.io which allows quick deployment of apps on DigitalOcean VPS instances. ServerPilot takes a lot of hassle with setting up new apps and given that it’s also got a free option it’s very appealing. It also deployed WordPress using the Nginx engine so it’s considerably faster than just the LAMP stack with Apache. For quick reference check out this guide for installing wordpress on ubuntu and also this one one installing wordpress on DigitalOcean. There’s also a good guide on setting up wordpress on DigitalOcean over at MyBloggingThing. It was a straightforward process to set up a new instance of wordpress and migrate the content from the old wordpress.com site to the new vNotions.com site. Once the site was migrated and fully operational I enabled CDN using CloudFlare to improve speed accessing the site from disperse graphical locations. All in all, it was a relatively painless process.
Right now I’m tidying up the posts on the site to clear out any old posts that are no longer relevant. I’d like to thank Mike Andrews for his feedback that set the ball rolling. For anyone thinking of checking out DigitalOcean I’d definitely recommend jumping right in. The support team at DigitalOcean were also top class and replied very quickly to an issue I had (self-inflicted I might add). vNotions has vMotioned from VirtualNotions.