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mushood's avatar
Level 41

Switch from Bluehost to Digital Ocean

Hello guys, I am considering a switch from BlueHost Shared Hosting to Digital Ocean. Here is a quick overview of what I have at the moment:

  1. Multiple domain names and subdomains
  2. Several projects on the same hosting. I have a public_html folder with subfolders for the multiple sites.
  3. Database management (phpmyadmin interface)
  4. Email service (bluehost have their own server)

Additional service that I am looking for:

  1. elasticsearch service
  2. redis/memcache
  3. manage queues
  4. HTTPS for all domains and subdomains

Here are my questions:

  1. Would i still be able to do what I was doing before on my bluehost acc?
  2. Would i be able to run the additional services?
  3. I know i need to assign my DNS with my droplet, BUT is it one droplet PER DNS. Meaning if i have multiple domains, multiple droplets.
  4. On a single droplet, can i provide HTTPS to several domains using let's encrypt?

PS: I also sent this to their customer service. I'm just interested in what you guys think as well.

Also if you have better solutions, do let me know

Thank you for helping

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4 replies
bobbybouwmann's avatar
Level 88

So for all your questions! Yes you can do them on DigitalOcean, however it will take you some manual work because you need to install everything yourself . Think about mysql, php, nginx, etc.

Now for third parties you are flexible as well op DigitalOcean. You can install redis if you wish and run a queue on there or you can use a seperate server that will run Redis for you. For example let's encrypt should now be done by hand. There are a lot of scripts out there that you can run and that will all just work fine as well. So with some research you have your server up and running in no time!

Now I do want to propose an alternative. Ever heard of Laravel Forge? Laravel Forge is exactly what you're looking for. From the panel you can create servers at DigitalOcean (or other parties) it will provision the server for you will everything you need to run any PHP application. By default it installs php, mysql, nginx, redis, etc. From that panel you can create websites and host multiple websites on the same server as well. It will get you a let's encrypt certificate with just two clicks and it will refresh it for you as well! Next to that you can create queue and manage them as well.

If you want to know more about Laravel Forge you can either visit the website or watch the series about it here on Laracasts: https://laracasts.com/series/learn-laravel-forge

mushood's avatar
Level 41

@bobbybouwmann Yep. One of the reasons I want to switch to Digital Ocean is because I can use it with laravel forge afterwards.

Thank you for shutting off my remaining doubts. I think i'm sold. :)

pardeepkumar's avatar

I would recommend to also try Cloudways. It is one of the best Managed Laravel Hosting. It allows you to create servers on 6 cloud infrastructures including (DigitalOcean, Vult, Linode, AWS, GCE) .

Cloudways take cares of the hosting pain points of Laravel developers through the following features:

Server Cost is included in the Cloudways price plan. Hence developers only need a single account and receive a single invoice.

Easily deploy Laravel applications from Github or Bitbucket.

Auto deployment for Laravel applications.

Supervised Queue Management

Team Collaboration feature assigns server and application access and roles to the members of the team.

Easy server management features including server cloning and server transfer.

One click auto backup with frequency ranging from hourly to weekly.

Configure scheduled cron jobs with cron job manager

Pre-configured firewall and security

Monitor everything with the New Relic monitoring system.

Scale up servers with easy vertical scaling.

Pre-installed Composer and Git

24x7 live chat support by cloud professionals.

The best thing is you can try it for Free

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