Bye bye Dreamhost, hello Digital Ocean

I finally made the move! I hate to let go of my dreamhost account, but finally pulled the plug today. I had a crazy domain insane plan which was approx $7.5 a month.

At $5 a month, Digital Ocean is a no brainer.
Things I have liked so far about them -

  1. Fanatical Support
  2. A really really clean dashboard interface
  3. SSD

Albeit it still is a more developer oriented account. I am sure in the coming days they are going to beef up their control panel and it will be even more easier to use.

What I have done so far to move off dreamhost -

  1. Took a complete backup of my Dreamhost account (in panel.dreamhost.com)
  2. Logged into Wordpress and exported everything to a wordpress.xml file (WordPress Dashboard > Tools > Export)

Then heading over to the Digital Ocean panel -

  1. Created a new Droplet, to make it dead simple I just selected "Wordpress on Ubuntu 12.10" under Create > Select Image > Applications

  2. Once the droplet is setup I got the ip address with the wordpress installation

  3. Completed the wordpress installation and logged in.

  4. Uploaded the wordpress.xml file I had exported earlier (WordPress Dashboard > Tools > Import)

One final step is setting up the name server details in my dreamhost account to point to the Digital Ocean account.

Thats it! It couldn't get simpler than this. :)

My WordPress Blog response time has gone down considerably!
Checked with Google PageSpeed the response time has gone from ~1.4 sec down to 0.39 sec.

I know, I know, one mustn't compare Shared Hosting with a VPS, but when it comes to the bigger bang for your buck and cheaper too, you won't see me complaining.

For the brave hearted who want to try it out - go to Digital Ocean

Yeah I'll get a referral, and you won't lose a dime in any case. :D

If you people are looking for promo codes, rather than hunting around on the web - just go to the source - send them a tweet on @digitalocean.

I got a $10/- credit from them with SSDTWTTR

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