Seems like website administration is a very broad topic and i cannot get a grip on it.
Currently i have a simple meteor app which i deployed to $5 digitalocean hosting. And … i have no idea how to interact with it. How do i dowload database to make a backup? How do i erase database to upload a new one/ make a fresh start? How do i change app listening port to upload second meteor webapp?
The only tool i have is a console acces. Which is scary and strange for a noob like me.
Where do i even start to learn all this things?
Wow! That’s a long list of things to tackle 
Off the top of my head, I’d learn the following things, in this order:
- Basic Linux environment (Ubuntu recommended, it’s the most newbie-friendly).
- Basic Linux administration.
- Remote access (via ssh).
- In a shell/console where you have the mongo client installed, run:
mongodump --helpmongoimport --help- These two commands are what you’ll need to dump binary data and import to another Mongo DB.
- Get yourself a decent GUI Mongo client, it’ll make things easier for you when starting out. I recommend either Robomongo or MongoChef (I like the latter better).
- Using a Mongo GUI client, you can easily select all your data and delete it.
That’s probably a decent starting point. You’ll also have to learn some basics about nginx in order to configure a web server/proxy for your Meteor app.
Of course, if you can spare $25/mo, I’d strongly recommend just using Galaxy which will let you focus 100% on coding, and then you don’t have to worry about devops stuff (server administration & config). You’d still need a Mongo database, though, as Galaxy doesn’t handle that for you (I recommend mLab which offers free sandbox databases.
Good luck!
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Holy hell, this is exactly what i needed. Thank you for your time and knowledge. This is great.
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Yeah I know how you feel, this was the biggest barrier to entry for me. I had previously always coded PHP and there are so many noob friendly PHP hosts out there. Digital Ocean is awesome but it is a lot of work and I never quite felt like I had everything 100% secure.
Like @ffxsam suggested, unless you are going to host multiple apps it might be a better option to use Galaxy or NodeChef to have that responsibility taken off your shoulders. I currently have a couple apps on DO, but haven’t touched the droplet in months, so I am worried its in need of a security update or something.
I also used to code in PHP, and hosting was easy indeed. Just open FIleZilla then drang&drop.
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MongoChef makes this a hell of a lot easier. No UNIX command-line magic spells needed!
Here I delete the “boxes” collection from my local test database, then copy and paste the boxes collection from the production database to my local test db.
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Their Data Sync & Compare tool is really cool too, but it’s hard to justify the price of $200. And $200 for their Schema Explorer… also hard to swallow, when MongoDB offers an official schema explorer tool that looks and performs beautifully—for free.
We pay $149 per seat for Professional. Considering how much time it saves us, sometimes I think I’d happily pay $30 per hour to use MongoChef. Haven’t seen the Data Sync Tool. Good to know about it.