Paying for a web hosting service that has all the hardware, as well as climate control and other needed tools, makes running a website significantly less complicated, and paying for the best dedicated server hosting is the best choice for this.
Using DigitalOcean is a great first option, and any service will offer a large selection of free plans with additional features, such as support. It is worth noting that the company’s support is often very good, as many complaints arise during the setup process. For example, all you need to set up a single-user domain is a username, and for servers, DigitalOcean offers a 1-click install from Docker.
Getting the DigitalOcean pricing is a bit more tricky than getting the others. Instead of starting off at a fixed rate, DigitalOcean charges a flat fee of $10 per month for the first year. After that, you pay $5.95 for each month you stay, though it’s a 15% discount off the base fee for six months or more. The firm also offers an account-by-account option. You can quickly get a sense of whether the $10 per month may be worth it. The $10 per month plan provides 2GB of WebSocket ports, but the price can go up to 10GB. The minimum is 1GB, which is too little for some situations. The WebSocket ports provide end-to-end encryption, although there is no option to turn it off.
A great feature of the site is the available SSD storage. DigitalOcean is extremely affordable at $0.28 per GB, and it ships with a 3TB SSD for free, with additional options, like SSDs priced at $0.60 to $1.00 per GB. It’s a feature worth checking out, and it’s more than reasonable for what you get. Additionally, the SSD storage is backed up in the cloud, and you can set it up so you don’t have to worry about it losing any data.
After one year of service, you will get to choose from two $10 per month plans: “Free” and “Basic.” If you use all your servers at full capacity, the “Basic” plan will cost you $55 per month, but you can get additional free servers for $10 per month each, though those also come with a limitation of two cores and two threads, if you want more. If you are starting out, the Free plan is certainly enough. In fact, the company now also offers a $5 per month plan for the first year that is free for new customers.
DigitalOcean offers hardware for all uses, and there are some excellent options. There is a 2TB SSD for $0.23 per GB, and the company offers 512GB PCIe SSDs priced at $0.03 per GB. It also has hardware to run your Linux and Windows desktop, of course is important protecting your site from software as ransomware which can take over your site if you’re not careful.
DigitalOcean allows you to turn any server into a storage server. You can specify a storage area network (SAN) with a limit of 64GB, so if you have a 256GB array of server drives, it will have enough storage to last about eight years. Alternatively, you can specify a single-disk RAID array that can be used to split storage between disks. DigitalOcean ships with a 1TB Drive Splitter with a 4K transfer, but they sell a higher capacity 1TB drive-splitter for $1.29 per GB. The company ships this device for free, so this is a great way to get a boost in SSD capacity.