Hey Friends, In this article, I will explain about starting a WordPress blog with Digital Ocean. So, What is it about? What is Blogging? Today many people are starting a blog after being pulled by the curiosity of seeing others making passive revenue.
A recent study states that over 500 million websites are started as blogs and most importantly 1.25 billion blog posts are published every day.
Every blogger has their own perspective towards blogging. Every day more new people are motivated towards blogging and writing to express their knowledge and experience.
Why People Start Blogging?
One of the main benefits of blogging is meeting new people daily. By publishing interesting content on your blog consistently, you will earn more new connections.
Blogging is not a get-rich-quick program or method of making money. But, when doing regularly will earn you a nice side income or even you can turn blogging into a full-time profession.
There are so many methods that are being adopted to generate revenue from blogging. But I covered this in another article, and in this article, I am going to share the procedures to start a WordPress Blog in the Digital Ocean.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is one of the most popular Contents Management System (CMS) suitable for blogging. An open-source platform powering nearly 65 million websites, which is supported by developers across the world.
WordPress is Free to install on any domain name and thousands of plugins and themes are available to increase your blog features. There are many other CMS are available, but none can beat WordPress.
Who is the Digital Ocean?
Digital Ocean is one of the leading Cloud Web Hosting service providers head-quartered in New York, USA. They have installed multiple data-centers across the globe to ensure dense connectivity.
Their cloud cluster allows you to deploy and scale multiple web applications according to your needs. Each installation is called “Droplet” which is nothing but a Virtual Private Server in the cloud.
You have the option to choose your data center and install multiple OS like Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. In recent days, the digital ocean has upgraded its infrastructure that allows people to install ready-made applications.
These features enable even a newbie with no coding knowledge and server management skills. You can easily deploy a server and set up a WordPress Blog on Digital Ocean.
Advantages of Digital Ocean Cloud Hosting:
There are so many cloud hosting providers are available, but the digital ocean has its uniqueness in this industry. Some of the common reason to choose Digital Ocean Servers for Hosting WordPress is:
1. Affordable Pricing under your Budget
2. Well-documented easy installation procedures
3. Redundant network and user-friendly interface
4. Can scale resources when needed
5. Dependable and guaranteed uptime
Digital Ocean allows any people to install their web application into their cloud server and the price starts from $5/month.
They have a clean dashboard that lets you manage your server installations effectively. They have the lowest price in the cloud hosting industry starts from just $5 USD per month.
Pay-per-hour usage, No minimum period of renting servers, no hidden fees like setup cost, etc. are the few other highlights.
How to Install a WordPress Blog on a Digital Ocean Server?
In this article, we will be going through the process of installing a WordPress Blog on Digital Ocean Cloud Server. WordPress is mainly used for blogging.
If you are a thriving blogger, I recommend not to waste your efforts on any random cheap, or unreliable web hosting providers.
Web Hosting plays a major role in blog ranking. A fast, reliable, and secured web server is essential for every blog so that you can thrive faster in this competitive world.
1 hour of your web server downtime will lead to a heavy ranking loss in the search engines. So you need to make sure that, your hard work should not be wasted in choosing the wrong hosting service.
The servers you install here are called Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS), which means that their entire resources are dedicated to handling your website only.
You will get root access to your server where you can control all your server resources. Cloud servers are more stable and do not suffer from meaningless problems. Cloud servers are secure, stable, and faster.
Register an Account with Digital Ocean:
This is the first process in setting up your Droplet with Digital Ocean. The process of registration is very simple and can be completed in a few minutes.
Go to DigitalOcean.com > Complete the form (It will ask for your First Name, Email Address, and Password to register your account).
After the sign-up process, you need to verify your EMAIL ID. So check your email for the confirmation link to click and confirm.
That’s another part, now you will be taken to the Login Page. Fill your Email ID and Password and click Sign in.
Now enter the OTP sent to your Email ID. Now you can log in to your dashboard.
After logging in you will be asked to add a Payment Method. There are two options including Credit card payment and PayPal. I choose PayPal as the preferred method of payment.
Select this option and you will be asked to add the money. In this case, I have decided to add $5 and click “Continue to PayPal”. Complete the rest of the process and your account is activated immediately to set up your first server.
How to Setup your First Droplet in the Digital Ocean?
Login to your Digital Ocean accounts using your Email ID and Password. After registering a free account with Digital Ocean, It’s time to Create (setup) your first Server. In the further part of this article, we will learn the complete process of setting up your server in the Digital Ocean.
The first option is to choose your Operating System for your virtual server droplet. After clicking this process, follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup. It will take approximately 5 -10 minutes to complete your first WordPress setup.
Required Tools:
- A Digital Ocean Droplet (server)
- Putty Tool
- A .com domain name
1. Choose Server DropLet:
The first option is to choose your Operating System for your virtual server droplet. You will be provided with multiple options and here I am going to cover about WordPress Installation in Open LiteSpeed Web Server.
Digital Ocean servers are broadly classified into four major categories and they are, Distributions, Container Distributions, MarketPlace, and Custom Images.
For our installation process, we will be choosing MarketPlace > WordPress > OpenLiteSpeed WordPress. Why I choose this option is because LiteSpeed Web Server is lighter, faster than Apache Web Server.
They have an inbuilt caching system that makes our WordPress Blog to load 300 times faster than WordPress installed in an Apache Server.
2. Select Droplet Plan:
After selecting your Installation File, choose a Preferred Plan. Here also, you will see four different categories of names Basic, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, and Memory-Optimized.
For our process, we will go with the basic plan worth $5 is enough for newbie bloggers. We can upgrade our hosting server anytime as our WordPress grows (getting more traffic and so on).
The basic $5 plan comes with 1GB RAM, 1vCPU, 25GB SSD Diskspace, and 1000GB Bandwidth. This server configuration is enough to handle your site visitors at your beginning. If you have a more monthly budget to spend, you can go with a higher configuration as well.
3. Choose your DataCenter:
The next option is to choose your Datacenter Location. You can deploy Digital Ocean droplets in 8 Different Countries.
Choose the data center located nearer to your target audience and market. A fast loading site can tend to rank better and a few years back, Google declared the site speed as an important ranking factor.
So, choose your nearest datacenter where your audiences are located, so that your blog will load quickly.
Since I am from India and my target market in India, I prefer to choose the closest Data center Bangalore. You can skip the next two options – VPC Network and Additional Options.
4. Secure your Server:
Now, you need to secure your Web Server which is the important process in your Installation of WordPress in the Digital Ocean.
Digital Ocean provides two options to protect your server. You can either choose SSH Login and/or normal encrypted password method to login to your server.
I prefer the first option of logging into my server through SSH access. In the earlier part of the article, I have mentioned a tool named, PuTTY which is used to log into your server. Download Putty Tool for Windows Operating System from Here.
After downloading the tool, complete the setup process and open the “PuTTY Key Generator” through Start Menu. We need to create our SSH Key for this Digital Ocean Droplet.
The process is simple, just roll over your mouse randomly in the space provided to generate your own SSH Key. Complete it to generate a unique alpha-numeric 2048 bit key which you need to copy it in a notepad and save in a secured location.
Now, add a Passphrase for the key to double your security and finally click “Save Private Key”. This will create a file with the extension .ppk on save on your local computer.
Now, paste your copied public key in the place shown in the below image and gave it a unique name, and click “Add SSH Key”.
5. Complete the Setup Process:
That’s all the process. At last, you can choose Backup Options (very essential convenience). A backup is very necessary to put your site online again in minutes if something unexpected happened like a server crash, hacking, or corrupt files and folders.
The cost of choosing a backup is very less when compared to rehauling your infected or hacked WordPress.
Click “Create Droplet”. Wait for a few minutes till Digital Ocean completes the server setup process. After some time you can see like the below screen where your droplet is listed.
Wow! Congratulations on your WordPress Setup on a Digital Ocean Server. The server setup process is complete now. We will proceed to the next process of adding your domain name to the server and install an SSL certificate and WordPress finally.
How To Complete Set up WordPress Blog on a Digital Ocean Server?
Now, your server is up and running along with WordPress application installed on an Open LiteSpeed Web Server. In the previous part of the article, you may have saved your private key in “.ppk” format which is now necessary to access your server.
The process involved is:
1. Adding Domain Name to your Digital Ocean Server
2. Installing an SSL Certificate
3. Creating Re-Write Rule to Force HTTP to HTTPS
Follow the below steps carefully to complete the domain setup process with the digital ocean.
1. Adding a Domain Name to your DO Server:
To perform the above operation, you need to open PuTTY from your computer. Open Start Menu and Search for the installation or type PuTTY in the search bar.
A box will open which will look like the below image and where you need to type the IPv4 Address of your Server.
After that, choose the option SSH > Auth from the left navigation menu and browse for the SSK key (already saved in your computer in .ppk file name). After choosing the file, click Open.
Now, you will be shown a command prompt window. Be careful from this step as a small mistake could lead to entirely disturb your setup.
In the first window, type your Domain Name (mywpdomain.com) and confirm the domain name by again entering the small letter ‘y’. Now Hit Enter.
Wait for some time until the process completes by itself. Now you will see a successful message “Domain has been added into Openlitespeed Listener”.
2. Installing an SSL Certificate:
An SSL certificate on a WordPress Blog/Website is essential to protect your site from hackers. SSL certificate secures your connection between the browser and the webserver. This method of secured communication prevents data theft and bandwidth theft.
Even Google says SSL is another ranking factor and all sites should be projected through a secured connection. Digital Ocean provides a Free SSL via Let’s Encrypt to its customers. The certificate installation process is very simple.
After the domain added to your Digital Ocean Server, you need to install an SSL Certificate for this domain. Follow the same procedure by confirming it by entering the small letter ‘y’ and hit Enter. Now the SSL certificate will be installed on your server automatically.
3. Creating Re-Write Rule:
After adding an SSL certificate to your domain name, don’t forget to add a proper redirection. Because you need to redirect all HTTP traffic to your secured HTTPS URL in-order to prevent Duplicate Content Issues. This will seriously affect your ranking as well.
Now, add a proper rewrite rule to direct all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS version. Just continue the process and confirm it by entering the small letter ‘y’ and hit Enter.
Awesome, your technical part of the server setup is complete. You have now successfully installed a WordPress Setup on a Digital Ocean server.
Complete Setting Up WordPress Blog on a Digital Ocean Server:
This is the last process of installing WordPress on a Digital Ocean Droplet. After the server setup, linking the domain name, installing an SSL certificate, open your domain name in the browser. The screen will look alike below the image. Choose the English language and Press “Continue”.
Now in the next screen, you need to carefully add some important information like “Site Title”, “WP Username”, WP Password”, “Your Email ID”. After adding the required information listed in the form, press “Install WordPress.”
Wow, Wow, Wow! You are really doing amazing tasks today. With no technical support and assistance, you have installed your own WordPress Blog in the Digital Ocean Server. In the next window, press the “Login” button to log in to your WordPress.
Is Digital Ocean a Good Host for WordPress?
The digital ocean provides one of the most reliable, scalable cloud hosting infrastructures for developers. You can easily scale up and scale down your server based on your usage requirement. Moreover, you don’t need to be a techie to set up a server and install WordPress.
All the process is automated and can be controlled through their impeccable dashboard. Within a few mouse clicks, you can complete your Setup WordPress on a Digital Ocean Server.
Wrapping Up
Digital Ocean is one of the most adaptable cloud hosting plans for bloggers. Their user-friendly dashboard and easily scalable infrastructure provide everything for a newbie to manage their web application.
In our case, it is a WordPress Blog. Also, the Digital Ocean has extensive documentation that can help you to overcome run-time issues. Thus providing a great user experience in managing a WordPress Blog.
You do not need to be a coder or a programmer to install a WordPress Setup on a Digital Ocean. Also, they have a 24/7 customer support to help you at any time in need.
With a strong infrastructure and implementation of the latest technologies, the digital ocean stands out as a leading true cloud hosting provider.
I hope that you have now learned to host a WordPress Blog on a Digital Ocean Server. If you still have questions or queries, feel free to reach me.
