How Elementor helped me discover the magic of Digital Ocean + EasyEngine
I am a writer, designer and academic and I started a content agency called Storyflock in 2018. In this text I describe the process of hosting multiple small sites with a shell-script collection called EasyEngine.
I have always needed to make websites for my projects. And how websites work has become an interest — I call myself a “part-geek.” For a non-engineer, I know a lot about quite a lot of different web technologies. Till late last year, I actually did not do a lot of command-line work. I hosted my websites on a shared-server at Dreamhost and was not even able to do very much.
I started using the Elementor plugin with my Wordpress sites sometime in September. The simplicity of its use was pleasing and its possibilities excited me.
Then, the Elementor editor (Pro + Plugins) stopped loading on my shared server! I was stuck.
I was searching for an option when my brother suggested that I buy a $5 droplet at Digital Ocean and try it out. Would it solve my problem?
Maybe, Elementor consumed too many resources for a shared server to handle? A few hours into it, and I loved it so much that I started shifting all my important websites to Digital Ocean!
What was there to love? Well, to begin with, the Digital Ocean interface is very minimal. Most things they actually expect you to do on the command-line. I liked the fact the tutorials are well-organised and do not expect much prior knowledge. So a geek can skim over it, but someone like me can also manage with copy-pasting everything. I understand technology but do not know all the details. I find their approach to writing tutorials much easier to read.
I have lots of small and low-traffic Wordpress websites (running Elementor). I was looking for the least resource consuming way of doing so.
It is easy to set up a $5 droplet (one-click-install Wordpress) for every website. But for my situation, this leads to a $25 spend a month and starts feeling wasteful.
I could set up a multi-site LAMP server. But all the articles I was reading about how nginx was more snappy than Apache made me want to try it out. I have been working with Apache and have not known an alternative.
I discovered EasyEngine while searching for command-line PaaS (platform as a service). I also found systems like Yunohost and Sandstorm, but they were not what I was looking for.
EasyEngine offered a single command to make a very low-resource consuming website. With five 50 visitors/day websites, nginx started crashing on the $5 droplet. So, I upgraded to the $10 droplet (more RAM). Now it works fine.
Maybe many tiny websites are equal to one medium-traffic website. What the nginx + Redis setup is good for high-performance for high-traffic websites. But that also translates to high-performance for many low-traffic websites. If you know better, please correct me here — I am only trying to explain my experience.
On their website EasyEngine has a statement describing the ruggedness of their setup:
I get the reference here, of course. And yes, nginx should change that copy a little bit :)
Elementor and its accessories has made me conscious of performance on Wordpress. Now bad performance can translate into no performance :(
Before something works, you need a robust and accessible staging ground. A multi-site setup using EasyEngine gives me one.
