I wanted to be able to deploy MailComments to my Digital Ocean droplet (VPS) easily and without thinking. Due to a lack of maintenance, some more “operations” work had piled up as well:

• The Digital Ocean monitoring agent had to be upgraded, but apt didn’t have enough memory to do that on this old, small droplet.
• The Ubuntu version running on that droplet was also a bit old by now.
• The easiest thing to do was to just create a new droplet and prepare it for deploying my personal websites.
• Unfortunately, my DNS setup was completely tied to the IP address of the droplet, so I couldn’t really create a new droplet, and quickly switch. I’d have to wait for the new DNS information to propagate.

These issues were in the way of progress, so I decided to take some more time to rearrange things.