I have been wanting to build my own blog for a long time, and it just so happens that my school courses cover C, Linux, and network communication. I had just installed Ubuntu and bought my own VPS, and I was excited to start experimenting with it via SSH. Before building my previous blog, I chose DigitalOcean's $5 per month VPS, with the following detailed parameters:

  • Memory: 1GB
  • vCPUs: 1vCPU
  • SSD Disk: 25GB
  • Transfer: 1TB
  • Price: 5 dollars/month

The VPS uses CenetOS 6 system, and I installed LMNP and a control panel (as well as ssr for convenient access in China and YouTube), built a WordPress blog system, used Let's Encrypt's certificate to enable HTTPS, installed a series of acceleration plugins, and tried SEO optimization, among other things.

Actually, the effect of building a blog on VPS at that time was not bad, and my VPS had many advantages, such as:

  • Full Control. Since it's your own VPS, you can decide what structure to use, what software version to choose, and so on. Compared to managed blogs, it has a higher degree of freedom. If you are an HTML/CSS/PHP expert, it's easy to use VPS to build a small blog.
  • Write anywhere, any platform. Using WP to build a blog, as long as you can log in to the backend with a browser, you can write, without the need to set up a Git environment like Hexo, which saves writing costs and time, allowing you to focus more on writing.
  • Modification takes effects instantly. After publishing or modifying an article, since the resources are stored on the VPS, you can see the new changes immediately after refreshing the page.
  • Other Features. For example, you can set up a proxy, use VPS to run a WeChat robot to achieve automatic replies, or use KodExploer to build a personal cloud disk to store small movies and strange torrent files.

Of course, choosing VPS also has its disadvantages:

  • Monthly Expense. Major service providers generally require at least $5 per month for the cheapest VPS, which is a expense for students who don't have income yet.
  • Only need a blog to record, and for friends who don't have a strong need for other functions of VPS, buying VPS is a bit redundant. Consider choosing websites like 简书 that support Markdown writing.
  • Buying VPS/buying domain name/learning CentOS or Ubuntu commands/building LMNP/configuring DNS/configuring HTTPS... and so on, the learning cost is too high.
  • One day, the server is down, and there is no backup. At this time, your blog and articles are gone, and you have to spend a lot of time to study and rescue your blog.

所以，我选择了Hexo

(To be continued…)

This is the first time I'm writing a blog using Markdown, and I'm not familiar with the syntax yet, so I need to learn slowly.