With the foundation (or 'Bedrock') of this upgrade complete it's time to see what some upgrades will do.
The plan of attack is to change MySQL to MariaDB, upgrade PHP from 5.6 to 7.0 and upgrade the DO Droplet to something with more power.
MySQL -> MariaDB
Why MariaDB?
For a few reasons, mostly for the features and to support OSS. There are some speed enhancements if the benchmarks are to be believed.
Like before, I'm backing up all databases before I change anything. Just in case.
$ mysqldump --all-databases -u root -p | bzip2 -c > /root/backups/all-$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H.%M.%S).sql.bz2
$ apt-get remove --purge mysql-server mysql-client mysql-common
$ apt-get autoremove
$ apt-get autoclean
$ apt-get install mariadb-server
PHP 5.x -> PHP 7
$ add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install php7.1 php7.1-mysql php7.1-mbstring php7.1-curl php7.1-gd php7.1-intl php7.1-xml php7.1-zip php7.1-fpm
$ php -v
$ a2dismod php5
$ a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif
$ a2enconf php7.1-fpm
$ service apache2 restart
Why PHP7?
This one's easy.
Twice the speed. Zoom zoom baby!
Resizing the droplet
Originally Bitten by the Travel bug was hosted on a simple 512MB RAM Digital Ocean droplet and was able to deal with the 40k hits per month.
Once the site started getting even popular (upwards of 100k hits per month) that original 512MB of RAM was not enough, so we picked the 2GB droplet and decided to monitor resource usage over 3 - 4 months and see if the smaller droplets would suffice.
Thanks to DO's Flexible Resize feature this can be done with minimal downtime.