Migrate Your WordPress From Bluehost To Digital Ocean

Bluehost is a great service that is incredibly cheap, but depending on the amount of traffic that you receive, a Bluehost server may not be able to accommodate in performance. For example my WordPress blog, the one you’re on now, receives too much traffic, which is why I had to host it on a VPS service. In particular I’m hosting this WordPress blog on Digital Ocean. Now, not everyone needs more than Bluehost so don’t think it is a bad service from the start.

Here we’re going to look at migrating a WordPress blog from Bluehost to a Digital Ocean virtual private server (VPS).

Install WordPress On Bluehost In Minutes

Previously I explained how to install WordPress on a Digital Ocean VPS Droplet. Now Digital Ocean isn’t for everyone because not everyone wants to manage their own sever. There is nothing wrong with this because there are easier solutions out there that will more than likely accomplish what you need.

This time I’m going to explain how to install WordPress on Bluehost shared hosting.

Install WordPress On A Digital Ocean VPS Droplet

I created this blog not too long ago in an effort to help developers, system administrators, and even bloggers. As many of you know, I’m using Digital Ocean to host this WordPress blog because it gives me the performance I need for the amount of traffic I receive.

In case anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, I’m going to walk you through getting WordPress up and running on a Digital Ocean Virtual Private Server (VPS) Droplet. However, this tutorial will work on any VPS that meets the operating system requirements I set, not just Digital Ocean.

Install The LAMP Stack On A Debian Linux VPS

So you’re at a time in your life where you want to manage your own web server. Maybe you are currently on a shared hosting plan and it isn’t giving you the performance you need because your web application is getting crazy amounts of traffic or maybe you just want to play the role of DevOps. My blog (the one you’re on now) is on a virtual private server (VPS). The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack sits on top of this server which allows me to serve web applications or support software like WordPress.

My VPS is hosted on a Digital Ocean Droplet with the Debian Linux distribution. Reading further will show you how to set up the LAMP stack on your own Debian Linux instance.

Blacklist Malicious Bots And Crawlers From WordPress

The internet can be an awful place sometimes. Let’s say you created a website or blog with WordPress that recently became popular and are now getting a ton of traffic. If it hasn’t happened already, you’re going to get a lot of bad traffic mixed in. By bad traffic I mean bots and crawlers that probably don’t benefit your WordPress site because it isn’t real human traffic or well established search engine crawlers.

There are a few good ways to blacklist these bad and potentially malicious bots and crawlers from even accessing your WordPress site. We’re going to take a look at how to do this through the Apache .htaccess file.

Monitor MySQL And Auto Recover From A Crash

Since starting this blog in July of 2014, I have had an unexpected amount of growth. So much, that a lot of strain has been placed on my virtual private server (VPS).

A common issue that has plagued me and many other WordPress users is the awful MySQL crash due to exhausted resources. This is because the server has run out of resources due to traffic spikes or other anomalies. The worst part for me is that MySQL tends to crash while I’m sleeping, putting my blog out of commission for up to six hours at a time. This is not good when you’re trying to be a reliable source of information on the internet.

Luckily, I’ve developed a script that will elegantly resolve these related problems.

Run A Node.js Application On A LAMP Stack Server

If you’ve been keeping up with some of my previous posts, you’ll know that I’ve been making an effort to move away from PHP ZendFramework (or PHP in general) to Node.js. Up until mid December 2014, my personal profile website www.nraboy.com has been using PHP ZendFramework 2, and for whatever reason it would crash my Apache instance constantly.

Since mid December 2014, I’ve made the switch to Express.js framework on top of Node.js. I did a previous post on the topic of Express.js and why I like it, but it is beyond the point for this particular article.

I have a few sites still running PHP and I didn’t want to pay for a new server strictly for Node.js applications. Instead I chose to run LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) side-by-side with Node.js on the same server. The following explains how I did this.