Before hosting here on the awesome GitHub Pages, I contemplated setting up a VPS server. One of my first choices, Digital Ocean recently sent me an offer for a free T-shirt if I set up a droplet and answered some survey questions.

I haven’t gotten a free T-shirt since my initial take on Xamarin, so I decided to see how hard it would be to setup Jekyll on a clean VPS.

Initial seutp was easy and the VPS control panel was clean and simple.

Getting the current blog up just required running a few commands: (and I didn’t even need to look them up)

apt-get install jekyll
apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/tmpreston/tmpreston.github.com

Running jekyll using the inbuilt server (jekyll server –host=0.0.0.0) proved to be nice and speedy too.

And just for completeness I tried nginx too.

apt-get install nginx
cp -R * /var/www/html/

The control panel has some basic in-built reporting already.

And a handy reset root password utility if you end up not pasting a valid SSH public key during droplet creation.

Everything worked well and prior to destruction of my little droplet I thought I’d check how fast the SSD disk was.

hdparm -t /dev/vda
hdparm -T /dev/vda

So if ever GitHub does decide that they don’t particularly want to be in the free hosting business I should be able to happily keep on blogging about my latest IT/Dev adventures.