Moving a Replit project to a client’s VPS — best deployment path for a news site?

Deployments
1

Hi everyone—looking for battle-tested advice.

I’m migrating a project I’ve been building on Replit to my client’s VPS. The site will publish news frequently, create topic pages, and grow over time. My plan is to export the code to GitHub and deploy on the VPS, but I’d love guidance on the best approach.

Context / needs

  • Frequent content updates, strong SEO (SSR/SSG?), fast TTFB

  • Editorial workflow (draft → publish), media uploads, roles/auth

  • Zero/low-downtime deploys, easy rollbacks, backups, monitoring

What I’m unsure about

  1. Containerize (Docker + Compose + Nginx) or run bare (PM2/systemd + Nginx)?

  2. CI/CD from GitHub → VPS: rsync over SSH vs. build/push image to registry and pull on server?

  3. Caching/CDN: Cloudflare + Nginx microcaching/Redis—worth it from day one for news?

  4. Media storage: keep on the VPS or move to S3-compatible storage for scalability/backups?

  5. CMS: headless (Strapi/Ghost) vs. classic WordPress vs. custom admin for non-technical editors?

  6. Staging vs. production on a single VPS—safe DB migrations and rollback strategy?

  7. Minimum VPS specs you’d recommend and any “gotchas” when moving off Replit?

Happy to share stack details if that helps. How would you set this up end-to-end? Thanks!

2

Welcome @dasaro83 - while I haven’t done this yet it sounds interesting from Replit to the destination you mentioned. Curious to hear what others say.