I recently received a notification from Amazon that my 12 month free trial was coming to an end. This made me realise a few things: I’ve been too distracted on other projects: Creating a Xamarin app Trying to set up my own mail forwarder with DKIM Adding AdSense and Analytics to a website with low traffic Setting up Amazon SES to send mail to… no one I would have to start paying for AWS in the coming months I haven’t posted to the blog in a while I spent a Saturday afternoon migrating everything to GCP.

I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog recently (and WedPort in general). Not only has summer meant less time spent at home to work on personal projects, but I’ve also been committing time to a 6 week online Python Course. I’ve been toying with the idea of learning Python for a while, and after hanging around on the Python Reddit I was lucky enough to sign up to a free track of the online CS101 edX.

In order to get your page ranked highly by the Google search engine algorithm, your page has to load fast. This isn’t always possible when you have a lot of content on your site, or lots of JavaScript code generated by WordPress themes and plugins. Thankfully, there is an easy way to speed up your site: using the PageSpeed module with Nginx. Benchmarking Your Site with Google Insights Google Insights is a fantastic tool for web admins to test the performance of a website.

In part 1, we saw how to set up your docker-compose file to spin up 2 instances of WordPress. Part 2 will show you how to make these site available on the internet, and how to secure them with HTTPS. The nginx.conf File Previously, when we set up the Nginx container, we passed it a non-existent nginx.conf file via a volume that we had configured. In order to get this working, we need to create the file at the path specified:

When I created this site, I wanted to make sure that I could run a segregated technical blog away from the human site, as well as enable HTTPS for security. This 2 part article will walk you through how to run 2 SSL-Enabled WordPress installations on a single server with Docker, using LetEncrypt for certification, and Nginx as a reverse proxy. A Reverse Proxy?! I decided that the technical blog should be WordPress, and whilst I decided how the main site would be implemented, I should also put a WordPress installation in place there too.

I started this project as a way to learn new skills with modern web technology. This post walks you through how to set up a new domain and get it pointing to your new host. I’m going to assume you have a semi-technical background. I would recommend setting up your hosting solution first, as you need something to point to once your domain is set up. I chose AWS EC2 as I wanted something cloud based and fast to spin up that allowed me to experiment with Docker.