Ditching shared hosting for DigitalOcean VPS nodes. Five bucks a month and full control.
permalink nebrivOriginally published on blog.benvirgilio.com
So after being on shared hosting at Dreamhost for about 4 years I finally decided to bite the bullet and set up my own servers, well virtual servers… Dreamhost has been great to me, I never once had an issue even while being on shared hosting, I guess I got on a really good, stable server. However I always disliked not having complete access to the guts of the server. There are of course fairly significant security risks with being on shared hosting and many of which I couldn’t mitigate on my own account.
It originally started with wanting to setup a honeypot as a lot of my peers at Champlain College were doing it and it seemed like a great idea to catch some neat malware samples.
After shopping around I stumbled across DigitalOcean, and for five bucks a month set up my own personal virtual private server, which at the time of writing gets me 512MB of RAM, 1 CPU (2-3Ghz), 20GB SSD storage and 1TB of bandwidth! More than enough horsepower to run a simple honeypot and webserver. DigitalOcean provides a great user interface and so far very quick support. Within hours I had my honeypot setup and within days I had it configured nearly perfectly. I will post a link to the statistics page once I sanitize the IPs listed, to prevent attackers realizing they’ve logged into a honeypot.
I realized how easy it was to setup a VPS and decided to go ahead and setup two new servers: One SQL server and one web-server. I chose to separate out the servers for two reasons. I host a few other websites (for friends), and if any of them really take off (traffic wise, etc) I will be able to scale them up individually, and the other reason would be of course due to security and the separation of services. I set up nginx and MySQL (numerous instances to host separate databases, again hopefully to add a small layer of security). Having never worked Nginx before I had to learn the whole new syntax, which is a lot different than Apache which I’m used to.
After getting everything setup and configured just right - so far… - I began to migrate the various websites over starting with my personal sites. It took me nearly a week in between classes and many late nights, but I’ve finally got everything setup and running. All that is left is setting up a mail server, which I am putting off as long as possible…
In the end, I will end up saving 30 dollars a year and will receive more flexibility, power and control and hopefully enhanced security. Seems like a good investment to me!