No Server Experience and Want to get started on Forge/Digital Ocean

1. I think you can host multiple on one droplet, right? Unless the space/bandwidth/CPU/RAM isn't enough for all 4 domains. You can setup multiple virtualhosts/sites with nginx/Apache.
2. If you need to setup a sub domain, you will need to point an A record to the IP (on the DNS control panel at GD).

so, the nameservers at GoDaddy are irelevant? I need to use the DNS mapping? When I tried to edit the DNS mappings on GoDaddy, the DNS mapping page says "The zone file is unavailable because the domain's set nameservers do not belong to this registrar." All four domains ARE registered at GoDaddy, so I am lost.

With Laravel Forge, do I need to set up the droplet on Digital Ocean or do I set that up on Forge. Sorry for the additional questions, but this is something that in my old life was done by the network engineer and I just wrote code.

You can normally do it two ways.

1. Nameservers on the registrar
2. Nameservers on your hosting
3. On some third party service like CloudFlare

Depends how you want to do it. I normally keep them on my registrar or if I'm using CloudFlare, I change them to that.

You can't map custom DNS records if you haven't got the nameservers setup with them.

I agree with @bashy on keeping the nameserver at the registrar. Usually it doesn't make sense to bounce the domain settings around from server to server. The registrar usually has a better UI for the settings as well. If you do keep it at godaddy then you just need to create A records and point them at you digital ocean ip's.

As for the droplet creation, do that at digital ocean. Off the top of my head I'm not sure that you can do that from forge. Forge is an amazing tool but I do wish that it had better documentation.

You can host as multiple sites as you want. Keep in mind that your droplet needs enough RAM, Space and CPU Power. On the smallest droplet i would host only one small site because 512 MB RAM isnt`t much for the complete OS and your website.s You can install tools like munin or something else to watch the server load. But if you log in to your droplet you get also an overview of the current server load.

Of course you need to know how to configure your virtual host from apache / nginx to configure the domains / virtualhost.

The only thing you have to do is to point the DNS A-Record of your Domain to the IP of your droplet. You dont need to change the nameservers. Take the nameservers from godaddy and you`re fine.

Just so you know you should be creating the droplet through forge. Once you have logged in and have connected your digital ocean account you should see a create server panel. Just use this to create your droplet.

Forge makes it super easy to set up virtual hosts too, so you can have multiple sites on one droplet. If you plan on having more than one site on a 512mb vps I would recommend you activate a swap file so everything doesn't go boom when you run out of ram:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04