Sometimes change is good and over the past couple of days I have decided to move some things around and make some changes the more obvious one is the theme I am using this one is a bit cleaner than the old one, the other change is more on the back end. Rather than stick with a shared hosting provider I have decided to just use a Digital Ocean Droplet for my site as I already use them for other small projects.

Rather than go with my normal LAMP stack which I know well and often used I have decided to go with LEMP instead as I have read Nginx has lower overhead (also it sounds better) which is perfect for a small droplet, Along with the change to LEMP running my own machine also allows me to do some other bits like using Let’s Encrypt to provide my certificate and also disable some older ciphers which no one should be using now anyway. With a little bit of work I managed to tweak the settings and get myself an A+ on the Qualys SSL Checker which is nice.

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At some point over the next few weeks I will write up some of the steps I have taken just incase anyone else wants to do the same thing but the entire process is fairly well documented around the web.