Lessons from setting up blogs and forums

Things I've learned in the past few days about setting up servers to host blogs.

VPS

• An intro to Virtual Private Servers & what's a VPS and what can it do?
• Self hosting guidebook
• Ultimate VPS beginner's guide
• Self-hosting with Docker
• Hosting multiple websites in one VPS with Docker and Nginx: I've learned that Nginx can be used to reverse proxy. I've also learned what reverse proxy means.

Static Sites

• Using Netlify to host static pages easily. The UI between a design site vs. an undesigned one is miles apart.

Wordpress vs. Ghost

• The Ghost UI is also miles better than Wordpress. It's simpler and it feels like it's of this era.

Apache2 & Ubuntu

• I learned to set up an additional user on Ubuntu to set up Apache2
• I learned to set up an Apache server to direct traffic to two different URLs
• Looked up Apache commands
• Had to troubleshoot why Apache wasn't starting. It took a bunch of searchers and logs, then I figured that port 80 was already taken by the forum that was already running.
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/629995/apache-not-able-to-restart
• https://www.tecmint.com/check-apache-httpd-status-and-uptime-in-linux/
• Starting, stopping Apache
• apache2 status failed status=1 failure
• Failed to start The Apache HTTP Server. Ask Ubuntu
• How to check which port Apache is running
• Figure out what's using port 80
• digitalocean how to turn off docker proxy to set up apache server
• digitalocean how to set up discourse on apache: Digital Ocean community forum pointed the the Discourse community.
• Then I read somewhere else that it's just easier to have two Droplets running rather than set up reverse proxies to host multiple sites. The basic misunderstanding is how Droplet monthly costs are calculated. The $5 or $10 a month is a max, not a given.

Question

• What's docker? How does it relate to containers?