I’ve been paying GoDaddy for wyethjones.com for over a decade. Briefly I used their site’s point-and-click tools to setup a WordPress site and made a few posts. This time I have somewhat different goals and want to dive in a little bit deeper.
I wanted to set it up more manually so I decided to host it on the smallest sized DigitalOcean droplet, which is $5/mo plus $1 for backup. Last weekend I used their tutorial pages to install the LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP). Then I used Let’s Encrypt to get an SSL certificate installed. I installed WordPress, picked a theme, and added some customized icons.
The process went smoothly and the only hiccup was a config file setting where the existence of an index.html file caused issues with the WordPress homepage loading the right php file. Once I deleted the html file it loaded fine.
I am planning to try out some other ways of building this site, including creating a container and scripting it. I’ll document the process at a high level here as well.
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