I’ve finally completed something I’ve put off for a long while because it just seemed too much work – migrated this website off digitalocean to opalstack. Before digitalocean I was at webfaction for a very long time, but it got sold to godaddy so I moved to digitalocean.
At digitalocean I used a droplet located in SF even though I am in mostly in singapore, partially out of nostalgia, partially because the biggest majority of visitors are from the US. But every now and then I would have performance issues: slow loading speeds, forms would freeze, it would take forever to add a tag. I use a lot of custom fields for this website so updating it became a pain.
I had to find a new host for my partner’s website because the droplet she was on got compromised, and digitalocean wasn’t very helpful about it. I cannot fault them as this is what it is like to manage your own server. I decided I didn’t want to manage my own servers anymore – it got tiresome having to install updates every so often – so after some research I found out that some ex-employees from webfaction started opalstack, so that is where I moved her website to. I like that is is very much like webfaction, it is almost like a vps with ssh but it is managed.
After successfully migrating my partner’s website I waited for a couple of months to see if everything is still going well. I was very comfortable with my setup at digitalocean so I was reluctant to move despite its performance issues. But I’ve been trying really hard to get myself out of a rut recently and embrace discomfort, so I finally decided to give it a go. This time I chose to be located in Singapore – surprised that opalstack has a server located here – to enjoy the speed benefits. Hopefully it is not too slow for you.
Previously I had plesk with git configured with webhooks to auto-deploy changes each time I pushed a commit. I was a little worried I couldn’t replicate this auto-deployment on opalstack since the control panel is relatively barebones compared to plesk and I am not that technical, but thanks to the opalstack community I managed to get github actions working.
Today I had a couple of issues with the migration so I had to email their support, both emails were replied within the minute despite the differences in timezone. It is nice actually emailing a human with a human response instead of something canned.
I am still concerned about what happens to my website after I am gone, and also the actual longevity of opalstack since it is a small friendly company. But well sometimes we just have to take a leap of faith.
Memcached is already pre-installed on opalstack so I took the opportunity to enable it for this website with the w3 total cache plugin. Everything seems so much more speedy!
Hope everything is working as it should, please let me know if you encounter any issues.