Behind-the-scenes of a WordPress Blog (Part 1)
This is part 1 of a series “Behind-the-scenes of a WordPress Blog“
This month marks the 10th anniversary of this blog so I thought I would do a behind-the-scenes tour and share with you some of the WordPress plugins and techniques that I have relied on and refined over the years.
Before we get into the WordPress specifics lets look at how and where the site runs. The website begin life on a Slicehost VM. I absolutely loved SliceHost, they came into the webhosting/vps landscape with disruptive pricing and just killed competition. Unfortunately, Rackspace acquired SliceHost and ran it into the dirt.
Enter DigitalOcean, I don’t remember exactly how I discovered DigitalOcean but the price was right, I migrated all of my websites and never looked back. So, DigitalOcean is where I now host the site, originally on a 512MB Ubuntu Droplet. It was challenging to configure Apache/MySQL to coexist with only 512MB of RAM but I was happy with the performance. When I upgraded from one Ubuntu LTS version to the next I did so by creating a new 1GB droplet and I migrated everything over. In late 2017, DigitalOcean double these 1GB Droplets to 2GB Droplet. Today the site runs on a 2GB Droplet with 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, and 50GB of SSD storage.
As I hinted, the host operating system is Ubuntu running Apache Web Server and MySQL. I have since fronted the entire site with CloudFlare which was a no-brainer for me. I’ve enjoyed the inherent caching and features that you get for FREE with CloudFlare. For example the site is now SSL enabled, I didn’t have to buy or install an SSL certificate. All SSL technicalities were handled by CloudFlare with the flip of a few switches.
