Jonathon, thanks for the reply.
I have been using a $5 droplet with an experimental Wordpress website, running it on Ubuntu 32-bit. I did everything manually so have had some experience on setting up a server and even installed a free SSL certificate. The main problem is having to SSH in every so often to make sure that Ubuntu gets the latest updates. I am sure it will save a lot of time and work using serverpilot.io
What I will do now is a very cautious move of my main (PHP) website to Digital Ocean to try it out. Here is my plan:
- Leave the original website alone at first
- Make a new droplet and create a second copy of the website on the droplet
- Make a robots.txt file on the new website to keep the search engines out
- Point the .org version of my domain name to the new website (the main website is .com, .org is not used at the moment)
- Test the new website thoroughly
- Either make a new droplet to transfer the original website to or simply point the .com domain to the .org droplet
I think I can get away with minimum to no downtime of the original website by using the current webhost to point the domain name to the new droplet, then transfer the domain name to my new domain name registrar and point it to the droplet as well. Then cancel my old hosting after 48 hours.
BTW do you know if it is possible to spread the load of a single website across multiple droplets? Have, say, one droplet in the USA and one in Singapore. Then automatically direct USA and South America traffic to the USA droplet and the rest of the world to the Singapore droplet. If one droplet goes down, then automatically redirect all traffic to the droplet that is still running.