Testing Digital Ocean
Wow, i’m not sure how I’d be functional either after driving that much and then going through meeting. Driving exhausts me.
I went through your DO video. It was fantastic. I followed it exactly and learned a bit about setting up the server.
Digital Ocean Fresh Install with Sample Data, no varnish, no redis, no nginx (home page)
Pingdom: 75 Grade, 1.2MB, 1.95s, 200 requests
Webpagetest: As F on static content, 3.36s, TTFB .309s, 200 requests, 1.03MB
I installed on Ubuntu 16.x.x(LTS), Magento 2.3.3
I have done zero optimization, obviously.
An update on Cloudways. I deleted my current M2 install and created a new one at cloudways. I wanted to go back through the setup on 100% fresh install and do the sample data etc… I ran in to issues even installing sample data. I think they have some sort of weird permission issue over there, honestly. I’ve seen chmod() not permitted while using composer. There has also been a cache issue when trying to run an install through composer. I needed to add a cache directory to magento’s composer.json file. The other problem that I have ran in to several times now on cloudways is that I will do some composer actions involved in sample data installation and the server will peg at 100% CPU usage and will not come off that usage 80-100%. Of course, this absolutely destroys usability of frontend and backend. Luckily, their restore option actually works so I can resort back to the “vanilla” install.
I have yet to play around more with nexcess at this point because I’m still waiting a resolution on the restore/backup issue and I don’t really want to experiment much without being able to easily revert back to my base install with the sample data.
Honestly, my best experience thus far has been hands down what I just did on Digital Ocean. Now to move on to the more uncharted territories for me. I may try and set it up with Nginx, Varnish, and Redis. I believe Nginx uses MariaDB, so I may have to go back through the video with setting up apache etc… and then install MariaDB instead of the traditional Mysql. That is all for another day though.
Digital Ocean Fresh Install with Sample Data, no varnish, no redis, no nginx (home page)
Pingdom: 75 Grade, 1.2MB, 1.95s, 200 requests
Webpagetest: As F on static content, 3.36s, TTFB .309s, 200 requests, 1.03MB
Varnish Install: https://www.plumrocket.com/blog/2019/07/how-to-configure-magento-2-varnish-in-a-few-clicks/
Install went flawlessly and the speed increase is very obvious when using the store.
DO Install After Successful Varnish Implementation (no redis, no nginx) DO 4GB,2CPU Plan Standard
Pingdom: 75 Grade, 1.2MB, 468ms, 200 requests
Webpagetest: As F on cache static, 3.556s, .219s TTFB, 200 requests, 1.03MB
I’m not certain on how/why webpage test is so much different, but the frontend definitely feels more snappy and quick. More along the lines of what pingdom shows. Are there any other speeds site anyone would suggest? I’ll throw one more in there, but don’t want to go too crazy with testing on too many sites as that’ll just take forever.
Thoughts at this point. Again, the DO setup has been flawless with no issues. Granted, I am basically following step by step guides. Even with the managed servers, I can follow magento documentation for something and it still seems that I can never get things to work smoothly the majority of the time. So far, the DO install is fantastic. We will see how the implementation of redis goes next. If that goes well then I will go back and start the build over on MariaDB/Nginx. Assuming all of that goes well then I will be left with a very tough choice on what to choose “Managed Cloud” or unmanaged DO. Again, security and having a little assistance to fall back on are very important to me. Stability and functionality are very important too. I will not compromise on the security aspect.