A New VPS to Host My Websites
I have two main websites: this blog called Corbin’s Treehouse that I started back around 1994, and Corbin’s Workshop where I sell some products and give away a bunch of digital files for CNC and 3D printing.
Both websites run on a Virtual Private Server or VPS for short. It’s crazy to think about how fast OS virtualization has come in order to run a web server on some generic computer out on the internet that is probably hosting a whole bunch of other virtualized machines.
I was previously using DreamHost to host my sites, and mainly because someone recommended it to me many years ago. Before that, it was Hostway (I think). I moved to using a VPS a long time ago, but performance was never quite what I thought it should be. Part of the problem is that DreamHost does a bunch of “hand holding” for the VPS, and limits what you can do to the machine. You can’t run your own database server on the same machine (ie: mySQL), and ultimately that is on some other machine, and has some latency for every database transaction. Originally DreamHost had the database server on the opposite coast of the united states, and any website query was incredibly slow. They fixed that, but performance was never really great. The sites were served using Apache, because that is what I knew, and I tried NGINX but couldn’t get it configured right.
So, I moved to a different hosting platform: Hostinger. They seem popular, the prices are better than DreamHost, and they give you full VPS server access (ie: root).
The main problem with Hostinger: the VPS would be on the east coast of the USA, and I’m on the west coast. The latency is around 90-100ms from my home internet, which isn’t great, but I decided to go for it. I thought they had a server farm in Phoenix, but it wasn’t available as an option for me to select (update: now it is…but I’d have to re-setup everything again).
I setup Ubuntu with CloudPanel to manage the sites. I haven’t used CloudPanel, but it is free and popular enough to easily find solutions to problems. I didn’t realize it until a bit later, but it uses NGINX, which meant I had to learn how to setup WordPress on that web server software. I’m not a super big fan of AI, but ChatGPT helped me quickly get things going. It was pretty easy to paste in my configuration files and ask it what needed to be changed to give the results I wanted.
Anyways…the website seems much faster now!
