Hi Paul,

I made the same move earlier this year – from a 32-bit VPS to full 64-bit, and due to issues with WordPress sites getting compromised and affecting/infecting each other, I also decided to move to containerised WordPress instances too (it was actually the driver for moving to 64-bit, I think Docker needed that or something).

I’ve got 2GB RAM and 30GB storage, so not much more than a standard VPS. I currently run 13 containers on my VPS, which consists of:

- mysql-server (one DB per WordPress site within this, separate users per DB, etc.)

- nginx reverse proxy to terminate SSL and direct incoming hostnames to the correct container

- pihole + wireguard + unbound for travelling

- portainer for managing my containers (I have two portainer containers, the second one is used to easily upgrade the first!)

- 6 WordPress containers

- 6 certbot containers, one per WordPress, generally used for first-time cert generation; otherwise stopped

- 1 certbot-renew container than runs once a month and checks all Lets Encrypt certificates, renews any that are expiring soon

I’m also using the official WordPress Docker image, I use the wordpress:php8.1-apache image so that I always get the latest WordPress available, but pin to a version of PHP, pretty sure I’m not running an instance of MariaDB per WP site with this!

I recently started using Docker compose stacks to manage my containers; the WordPress sites + nginx + MySQL are in one, the certbots are in another, certbot-renew is in another, and pihole + vpn is in another. Makes it easy to update/restart/manage different sets of containers together.

I’ve not had any performance issues with any of my sites or with my VPS in general. Mine are also generally low traffic I used to run all these WordPress sites directly on the VPS with Apache virtualhosts before, if anything I’d say it runs better now. According to htop, I’m using 1.2GB of 1.9GB of RAM, and just over 50% of my 1GB of swap. Load average is 0 – 0.1 whenever I check.

Happy to share any of my config if it’s helpful.

Cheers,

Paul

From: Paul Tansom via BitFolk Users <users@mailman.bitfolk.com>
Date: Saturday, 25 November 2023 at 18:25
To: users@mailman.bitfolk.com <users@mailman.bitfolk.com>
Cc: Paul Tansom <paul@aptanet.com>
Subject: [bitfolk] Docker on VPS

Does anyone else use Docker on their VPS and if so what spec is it running on? I'm migrating to a new one to upgrade to 64bit and decided to try Docker. It has worked pretty well on my local servers, none massively powerful, but in spite of being told the overhead of multiple copies of things isn't much of an impact it seems I have obliterated the capability of my VPS barely half way through the process, with htop registering both swap and physical memory maxed out.

I've migrated 8 WordPress sites and had to disable 3 to regain some level of stability (these using the official WordPress Docker image, which admittedly spins up Apache and MariaDB for each one). I've decommissioned 2 WordPress sites, but have 7 more to move (4 of those being in 2 multisite setups) as well as 3 phpBB, 3 Piwigo and a Roundcube, not to mention email and mailman.

These are low traffic and experimental sites in many cases, but at the moment I'm debating between reverting to the old setup (possibly an issue as my phpBB sites are planned to migrate to Discourse which started the Docker idea), or moving the databases into a single container, and possibly the WordPress sites into a single Apache (which also part defeats the object of Docker I guess).

I was expecting more load, but not this much. Part way through is not an ideal time, particularly when I'm still battling COVID two and a half weeks on from catching it (which isn't helping my thought processes!).

Any thoughts from the collective wisdom here?

Paul Tansom  |  Aptanet Ltd.  |  https://www.aptanet.com/  |  023 9238 0001
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