TechFriday: Servers, webhosting, pricing and performance
Posted By RichC on January 19, 2018
Besides my personally server and fading Raspberry Pi server projects (just too small), I been using several different companies to host Internet connected servers for Consolidated Printing and Publishing’s customers – traditional servers and virtual Droplets. Having used a variety of dedicated servers and virtual shared machines over the years since first getting into archiving digitally for customers and webhosting in the 1990s, I’ve seen good and I’ve seen really lousy.
A current favorite is DigitalOcean. Their "Droplet" options are near perfect for most Linux projects; they are inexpensive, reliable and can be "spun up" quickly for each customer or a testing environment. The longer I use them, the more comfortable I am with scalable cloud computing. About the only thing I dislike is 
managing (and paying for) backups and "snapshots." The latter I use the most.
Recently they upgraded performance and pricing to bring them inline with the lowest cost players in the business … although I haven’t looked into Vultr or Linode since a few dollars a month isn’t hardly worth switching (who knows, I might give them a try next project though?)
For now, all seems to be working with my old school servers and using Digital Ocean for virtual machines and attached SSD volumes. MyDesultoryBlog running on WordPress occasionally stresses the smaller processor and memory, so with the new pricing I’ve added some additional memory and some SSD storage, plus use a DO Volume for some extra storage, Amazon Web Services (AWS) for streaming video and my company’s myarchive.us server for most photos.
Perhaps in 2018 I’ll give MongoDB and Digital Ocean’s Spaces a try for my stalled Quickdex.com project? If you are interesting in anything I can do for you, send me a message.
Comments