I’ve decided to move the Brussels Kitchen Garden site onto its own Virtual Private Server (VPS). This is a great opportunity for many reasons. I’ve been wanting to try out Debian 9 “Stretch”, MariaBD, PHP 7, HTTP2 and especially Nginx.
First things first
I created a new Linode VPS based in Germany to ensure best possible connection speeds for mainland Europe which is the targeted primary audience. As always, working with Linode for VPS creation, configuring and rollout is a joy. They had already created a Debian 9 image so I installed that as the base operating system then created a LEMP infrastructure (Linux, EngineX, MariaDB & PHP).
Why the need for moving?
Brussels Kitchen Garden (BKG) has been steadily growing since its inception, there are new changes and updates that will be employed next year for the start of the 2018 growing season. Primarily the requirement to make it available in multiple languages, starting with English (default), French and Dutch.
The processing power required to achieve this with reliable caching in place necessitated its own VPS with dedicated RAM and a lot of the advantages that running Nginx as opposed to Apache provide.
In Conclusion
I’m very happy with the initial results, configuring Nginx is not as simple or intuitive as Apache but once that hurdle was overcome the other software behaved well and it’s a great start. I hope to write further posts about my discoveries in the future as time allows and battles won.
