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DigitalOcean has some really nice features. They call a VPS instance a droplet. You can create a droplet based on variety of Linux flavors and you can select regions, size and automatic backups. They also provide free snapshots! Backups cost money though. You can add your public SSH key while you create a droplet so you can later SSH into it and manage the box easily. Their knowledge-base articles are the best documentation I’ve see for server maintenance, tools setup and configuration. The articles that they send you through email after you create a droplet is pretty nice and I was able to setup my Ubuntu droplet fairly quickly with some basic security and server configuration (nginx, fail2ban, SSH hardening, UFW rules etc).
While switching to DigitalOcean I decided to use Jekyll instead of hand crafting the site code. It’s so much easier to focus on the content instead of site maintenance. It’s faster to write blog posts in markdown and just issue one command to build up the static site with tons of features. Jekyll provides an easy way to manage layouts, includes, variables, pagination, drafts, tagging, categories and various other features. I’m really happy and productive with this setup i.e DigitalOcean + nginx + Jekyll. I hope I stay on this for a while before I get distracted by something shiny and start all over again.