Tag Archives: Wordpress

How to setup WordPress on Digital Ocean (2020)

Technology, ,

With incidents such as Australian bush fire, Covid-19 Pandemic and civil unrest in many countries over one reason or the other, 2020 is basically proving to be one long nightmare. To make it worse for me, my server got hacked, majorly due to lack of proper security or a bad WordPress vulnerability (To put it in the words of Einstein, mildly, human stupidity has no limit).

So I decided to migrate the server to a new one and this time decided to invest some time in making it more secure. This guide is basically a document to setup such a server to host WordPress sites with as much security hardening as I possibly can do. 2020, bring it on!

Continue reading How to setup WordPress on Digital Ocean (2020) →

How to secure your site using Lets Encrypt

Technology, , , , , ,

If you have your own site, encrypting is something that should be mandatory. Not only does it makes your site secure against hackers/crackers but also google rank those sites higher who serve their site on https.
Here’s how you can secure your wordpress based site using certificate provide by Lets Encrypt.

Some background:

I am quoting the following direct from the Let’s Encrypt site:

To enable HTTPS on your website, you need to get a certificate (a type of file) from a Certificate Authority (CA). Let’s Encrypt is one such CA. In order to get a certificate for your website’s domain from Let’s Encrypt, you have to demonstrate control over the domain. With Let’s Encrypt, you do this using software that uses the ACME protocol, which typically runs on your web host.

If you have shell access (that is if you can connect to your host using PuTTY), you can follow the instructions provided here to install certbot.

Process:

Assuming your wordpress site runs on nginx web server on Debian 9, here’s how to do it:
Add the repository source in your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main

to your /etc/apt/sources.list (or add a new file with the “.list” extension to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/) Continue reading How to secure your site using Lets Encrypt →

Setting up WordPress on Debian 9.3 x64 on a Virtual Machine on Windows 10

Technology, , , ,

In this article I am documenting the exact steps that one needs to host a wordpress based site on a Debian based virtual machine (VM). I choose debian since that’s one of the preferred distro based on it’s stability and smaller footprint on resources compared to Ubuntu. But you may very well choose Ubuntu, only some steps in below documentation would differ.
This article deals with following technologies:

  1. Windows 10: The host operating system
  2. Oracle VirtualBox: The Virtual Machine software
  3. Debian 9.3 x64: The distro which we will install on the VM
  4. nginx: The web server
  5. mariadb: MySQL database solutions
  6. php: The package which installs on Debian automatically as a dependency
  7. phpMyAdmin: Administration tool for MariaDB

Continue reading Setting up WordPress on Debian 9.3 x64 on a Virtual Machine on Windows 10 →

Steps to add a WordPress Site to an existing VPS

Technology, , ,

I use to have a hard time configuring a new site under a common VPS. So I decided to document the steps for easy reference in future.
Following are the steps to add a new site “site-name.com” under a new user account “username” on your Linux VPS. This is to note that this works if you have the following web service solution stack (LAMP):
Linux OS : Debian
Web server: Nginx (Not Apache)
Database: MySQL
Application Programming Language: PHP
So here we go:
1. Buy the domain. Call it site-name.com.
2. Set the nameserver of the domain to point to the IP address of your VPS under ‘A’ record which stands for ‘Address’. For reference, there are other kinds of record like ‘CNAME’ and ‘MX’, but you don’t need to set them at this point.
3. Create a new user on VPS by command by following command.

sudo adduser username

This command also creates a new home directory for the user.
Continue reading Steps to add a WordPress Site to an existing VPS →

I migrated to Digital Ocean

Technology, , , ,

It was about one year that this site was hosted on a VPS server of Leaseweb. They provided a good set of specs but had some amount of unreliability when it came to providing 24×7 up-time. Also it once had a service outage that resulted in the loss of our data. Thanks to offline backups and Google cache I was able to restore all my posts. So it was high time before we moved onto something more trustworthy. It was then when I came to know about Digital Ocean, an SSD only VPS hosting provider. After a lot of geeky research I realized how quickly they grew their scope to provide a quality platform for VPS.
What follows next in this article is the story of how I migrated to DigitalOcean with help from my friends. Be warned that this article is fairly technical and can also serve to anyone who wants to migrate to DigitalOcean. I wholeheartedly thank Aaruni for his help on setting up the server, without his help it could have taken me days to do the same.

1. New Server on DigitalOcean (DO) VPS

There are numerous VPS providers but none at the feature to price ratio which DO provides. Hence me and my online friends decided to go for the most basic plan of $5 per month, which provided us with following features:

  • 512MB Memory
  • 1 Core Processor
  • 20 GB SSD Disk Space
  • 1TB Transfer Bandwidth

This configuration is modest to run a Unreal Tournament (UrT) gaming server and to host numerous small websites which were our requirements. Plus its easy to upscale so starting from the smallest option seemed to be a wise decision.
Continue reading I migrated to Digital Ocean →