Bigger site failing on DO $5 droplet

Developer help Installation
1

Hello,

I have moved my site mrhack.io from WordPress to Ghost - smallest $5 Digital Ocean droplet. It has ~5K posts and just above 10k visits per month.

But, it started to fail on Ghost - I’m using UptimeRobot - and site is down few times per day, I need to do ghost restart.

In DO dashboard I can see that CPU usage and Disk I/O spike when the site is down. Probably it is because of large database.

What would you recommend apart from upgrading?

If upgrading, which droplet can solve the issue?

Thank you a lot!

2

Try the free version of cloudflare.

3

You could also try enabling more virtual memory on your droplet. The technical term is a swap file:

4

thank you @shodandad!
Seems the issue is solved with adding a swap file. I followed this guide:

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5

Glad to hear it!

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6

Why not go for the managed version from ghost.org? Ghost(Pro) - Official managed hosting for Ghost

It frees you from low level sysops stuff. It’s not that expensive and a good way to support the team and future ghost development?

7

That’s what I’ve done with mine. It’s very easy to setup a DO blog but I want to focus on writing articles instead of managing servers etc. Too much when I last tried it. Their prices are reasonable and I can now sleep at nights thinking on what article to post next.

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8

@binaryanomaly @SylarRuby yeah probably managed version is the way… So far this issue seems to be solved, will see.

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9

I am tbh thinking about it, too.

DO is good to try out but even if ghost is quite simple and easy to maintain I don’t think it’s worth my time and I rather spend 4$ more a month to make it somebody else’s problem with the positive side effect that I support development etc.

Edit: Just did it :slight_smile:

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11

I’m self hosting mine at home using unraid and docker. Two click updates - easy peazy.

I want full control over every aspect of my data.

Cloudflare is the most essential component of all of this, and is free too!