Running Ghost Blogs on a DigitalOcean Plesk Droplet

Simplified Web Management on a Budget with DigitalOcean

Jasmine Robinson
2 min readOct 22, 2023

In the fast-paced world of web development, managing multiple websites and databases can be a daunting task. For those of us with a collection of half-finished projects and a desire to keep them accessible for future development, the cost and complexity of managing all these projects can be discouraging.

In the past, I relied on Cloudways for my PHP projects, appreciating its ability to effortlessly set up Laravel or WordPress sites and databases on a single server instance. It was a managed solution that saved me the time and hassle of server maintenance. However, as my focus shifted towards Node.js, React, and Next.js development, I encountered a problem. I couldn’t find an affordable, fully-managed hosting provider with a simple control panel for Node.js projects. That’s when I stumbled upon an elegant solution of running Plesk on a DigitalOcean Ubuntu Droplet.

What is Plesk?

It’s a user-friendly web control panel that lets you effortlessly handle multiple websites and databases, all through a simple and intuitive interface.

Benefits of Plesk and Digital Ocean

  • Cost-Efficiency: One of the major pain points for developers is the rising monthly costs associated with deploying individual apps on platforms like Heroku, DigitalOcean, or Netlify. By combining Plesk with a DigitalOcean Droplet, you can significantly reduce these expenses by deploying multiple apps in one droplet.
  • Simplicity: Plesk’s user-friendly interface simplifies website and database management. It’s perfect for developers who want to focus on coding rather than server administration. For example, you can easily access all your sql databases from phpmyadmin which comes out-of-the-box with Plesk.
  • Versatility: Whether you’re working with PHP, Node.js, React, or Next.js, Plesk is adaptable and can cater to a variety of development stacks. Especially since you can deploy docker containers inside Plesk.

How to Set Up Plesk on a DigitalOcean Droplet
In this example, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to host multiple Ghost blogs using a DigitalOcean Droplet with Plesk. This project also gave me the chance to experiment with Scribe, a fantastic tool for crafting tutorials.

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Jasmine Robinson
Jasmine Robinson

Written by Jasmine Robinson

Eternal Optimist | Senior Technical Program Manager - http://jazmy.com

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