Hi everyone. I’m new to Kirby and am thinking of using a LEMP droplet from DigitalOcean to host my install as I’ve read NGINX is more efficient for static content. I was hoping to start off with the cheapest option they have (512RAM, 1core) and setup 1-2GB of swap . I have two questions though:
Do you think this would be enough for a simple blog?
What is easier/simpler to setup? Apache or NGINX? (I’m new to to both)
I’m not expecting much traffic as no one out there knows me. And in any case, scaling would just be matter of upgrading to more ram and cores, right? Thoughts?
512 MB RAM is far then enough for Kirby. It has minimal footprint on loading and if you ever happen to run out of resources, nginx is also great at being a cache proxy. Until you reach 10k-50k views a month, I can it imagine being enough.
In my opinion, nginx is easy to set up, and is way more lightweight than apache.
In my experience hosting on Digital Ocean for the past 2 years, the base droplet, 512MB, 1 core, is MORE than enough for Kirby if you are getting less than 100 hits a day. Maybe even 1000. I’d love to run some DDOS attacks on my own site to find out how much it could take…
Personally I prefer Nginx, there are lots of guides for setting it up, but I actually think Apache is easier for a newbie. Kirby works on Apache out of the box, you will have to do a little bit of extra setup to get Kirby running on Nginx. There’s been some discussion on this here forum about it.
For the record, i’m running 4 or 5 medium sized sites on a VPS with 2gb of ram (Apache/CentOs 7/PHP7/kirbies default caching) and its not even using a quarter of the total ram in total.
I run 2gb VPS with about 10 sites - 7 low traffic - 3 medium traffic and it gets to like 5% load.
Even the file cash works fast. Memcache will eat up your ram and makes things actually slower if you don’t have enough of it. If you want more lower load sites on one server i would test if memcache is advantage.
Swap on SSD servers is i think problematic. Digital Ocean advises against it there is much higher degradation of the disks (their problem… i guess) but it can also lead to data corruption which can be pretty bad with filebased systems.
Also instead of digital ocean i think vultr is a great choice. I switched some time ago and in many cases vultr is even faster while being cheaper. They also have cheaper backups. Digital Ocean seems to be focusing more on their products now like object storage and block storage (basically they want to compete with Amazon AWS).
NGINX is awesome, you could also try Caddy i use that on our servers and its pleasure. But i could not pick between the two. Caddy is easier and faster to configure, Nginx is a bit more performant.