First WordPress website running on Linode... and now what?
I signed up at Linode to find out how easy/hard it was to use a VPS instead of shared hosting. Turns out that, so far, it's very simple to get multiple (WordPress) websites running.
This is what I did:
- Created a Linode (1GB, Ubuntu)
- Installed NGINX web server
- Installed PHP and a few extensions (zip, curl)
- Installed MySQL and created database
- Added website to Cloudflare
- Installing SSL and connected to Cloudflare (this took me quite some time to figure out)
- No mail server since I decided to keep my mailboxes at SiteGround (using an SMTP plugin for WordPress so the website can send email through Gmail)
- In the future I want to look into installing varnish cache
So basically this is all I need and so far everything is running smoothly (and very fast!) I come from shared hosting providers, which is at times very limited and I never had to do any maintenance of any kind.
Some questions…
- Will there be anything different now that I'm on a VPS?
- Do I have to keep an eye on server updates or anything like that?
- How many websites can I put on one my 1 GB Linode? I know this depends on the size of the websites, but how do I know it's "too much"?
2 Replies
mjones
Linode Staff
It's great to hear it was easy to get everything set up. In general there won't be much difference with how you interact with WordPress, but you'll have more access on your Linode to make any needed changes in Apache, MySQL, PHP, or other services.
I'd recommend regular updates of the software and services on your Linode. Depending on which distro you're using you can update with either the following for Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Or this for CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum update
In addition, I'd recommend keeping WordPress and it's plugins up to date as you usually would.
It's tough to tell how many sites a Linode can support, but if you ever see that your Linode's CPU usage is close to 100% of each core, or you're running low on memory or having OOM events, the it may be time to resize. You can check the resource usage of services on your Linode with the 'top' command.
Thanks, I'll keep an eye on the updates.
The last few days I've been trying to enable gzip and set up leverage browser cache, but no luck so far. Everything I try (changing config files for one website, or even server wide) doesn't result in a positive test on GTmetrix, Google Pagespeed, etc.
Any suggestions how to do this?