DigitalOcean Cloud Solutions
As time goes by, technology trends are moving forward. The hosting industry is also changing and right now, more and more classifieds sites choose cloud-hosting solutions to power their businesses. Cloud hosting has become accessible to both small startups and entrepreneurs making their first steps in the e-commerce.
There are many cloud hosting solutions, however, we recommend DigitalOcean as it meets the following requirements:
- Transparent and understandable pricing policy;
- It is one of the most straightforward and user-friendly;
- Meets all Flynax server requirements;
- Provides a functional dashboard with many configuration options;
- Reasonably priced and highly scalable;
Pricing
The minimum price per month is as low as $5 per month, giving you 1GB of RAM, a single-core processor, 1TB of traffic and 25GB of SSD space to host your ads and other data. This is a great package for a startup, and therefore, we recommend it to all of our customers who are starting their websites from scratch.
Once your website grows bigger and receives steady traffic, you may easily upgrade to, for example, a $20 monthly plan which will give you 4GB of RAM, a dual-core processor, 4TB of traffic and 80GB of SSD space. You may consider all of the plans and choose the one that best fits your business.
Getting started
The server in the DigitalOcean is called a droplet. To create it, you need to choose the OS, web server version and other tools required to get your server up and running. To jumpstart your business, we have teamed up with DigitalOcean and have prepared a special offer for all of our customers: create a hosting account with DigitalOcean via this link, and DigitalOcean will add $100 to your account balance, which you will be able to spend on services within two months.
Added to that, we will also configure the server install the script for you for absolutely free. If you choose to DigitalOcean all the setup and configuration on your own, be sure to choose Nginx as your web server as it is times faster and more stress-proof than a classic apache server.
Vertical scaling
One of the benefits of cloud solutions is its fast and simple transition from one plan to another. In other words, if you see your traffic growing, you may easily change the plan right from client area in your hosting management account.
As recommended, you may start with a $5 plan that gives you 25 GB of SSD space; however, if you import thousands of ads from third-party websites, you will obviously need more space to host them. In this case, you may simply increase the SSD space on your droplet. DigitalOcean charges as low as $0.02 per additional GB stored and $0.01 per additional GB transferred, so $5 extra per month will give you extra 250 GB of storage!
Horizontal scaling
In contrast to vertical scaling, which means adding more resources to the existing droplet, horizontal scaling means adding more droplets rather than expanding the existing one. If you are an ambitious startup, you may want to create a cluster of servers ready for high loads. DigitalOcean offers you a solution for this as well. It will only cost at $20 monthly, which is rather inexpensive for this type of cluster configuration:
- 5$/mo | 1 x droplet-cpu1-1gb for Nginx;
- 5$/mo | 1 x droplet-cpu1-1gb for Mariadb;
- 5$/mo | 1 x droplet-cpu1-1gb for Php-fpm;
- 5$/mo | 1 x ssd-space-250gb for CDN.
As you can see, this system is ready to be connected to extra php app, databases or CDN servers. You may also apply vertical scaling to any server in the system. Setup and configuration of a cluster system like this one will require certain skills and knowledge and maybe time consuming. If you don’t want to DigitalOcean this on your own, we may perform all the setup work for a fee of $95.
The regional approach
DigitalOcean’s data centers are located in countries all over the world so that you may select the location that is closest to your target audience to attain faster page load and uninterrupted access to your website. When choosing a data center, we recommend that you select the one closest to your region; this will also help your website get better SEO rankings.
Advanced backup system
Digital Ocean offers you a backup system to ensure that all of your website data is not lost and you may always revert to an older state on your Droplet. Enabling a backup for your droplet will add 20% to the cost of the server and this service is optional when creating an account. You may add backups to your droplet or opt out of them any time right from your client area.
Security
Digital Oceantakes security very seriously and access to the network infrastructure is provided through multi-factor authentication points. The data transfer is automatically secured with SSL (HTTPS) protocols allowing you to make your files either public or private. Storing and securing your data is DO’s highest priority and you may read more on how Digital Oceanapproaches security.
As you can see, Digital Oceanoffers you an ultimate hosting solution for a reasonable price. The benefit is that you may use it for a small startup or a high-load project. Cloud hosting is also flexible, scalable and high-performing, so if you decided to go with cloud hosting for your classifieds site, we recommend that you choose DigitalOcean as it has proved its stability with Flynax classifieds script.