Web Hosting is one of the most important aspects of every website. And this article is going to help you choose a good hosting provider to host your website.
DigitalOceanit is 🙂
In this highly competitive environment where everyone is fighting for people’s attention then it becomes a lot more important to back your website with good power. Statistically speaking, if your website is taking more than 2 seconds to load, there is more than 70% chance that the visitor will pass your website.
This tells us one important aspect- out of all the benchmarks, speed is often the most important metric in retaining your customer.
That is the whole reason behind writing this article. And also I wanted to give you some free credits to take your website on DigitalOcean Cloud
Here’s $10 Free DigitalOcean Credits once you sign up a droplet. (Click on the image and sign up for a droplet to get the credits)
There is one more reason behind this article, I want to help you to choose the best and the Fastest Cloud Hosting Provider which is reliable and affordable.
Table of Contents
DigitalOcean: The Fastest Cloud Hosting Provider
I have been using DigitalOcean for more than a year now and I’m really very happy with it.
In the last 2 year, I have never faced any sort of downtime because of DigitalOcean.
Also, DigitalOcean has a really impressive price system for the kind of power and performance it offers to its customers.
Another aspect that I love the most about DigitalOcean is that you can very easily scale your entire website’s resources just with the help of a click. Be it CPUs, Memory, SSD etc.
I will talk about all the aspects that make DigitalOcean?the best Cloud Hosting Provider out there.
Affordable for Everyone
DigitalOcean has taken care of everyone’s need. No matter how small or how big, DO offers multiple plans for different requirements. Have a look at their impressive prices:
Plan Starts at $5
I started with the $5 dollar plan and you know what- it turned out Pretty Awesome.
It was the start of my professional blogging career and there is one important thing that I learned that day:
[bctt tweet=”Taking money out of your pocket is very important for its multiplication. ~Varun Shrivastava” via=”no”]
Before this, I was looking for cheap solution and alternatives which did not help me at all. I was successful in finding the best free web hosting providers on the web but to be fair, nothing worked out for me. It was all because I was not applying the formula correctly.
Well, let’s get back to the topic.
$5 dollar plan is very affordable for most of the people. But, if you could spend a little more from your pocket then I would suggest you go with the $15 flexible plan that has 2GB Memory and 2CPUs.
Or the best thing is to start with $5 dollar plan, set up your application, test for a month and when you start loading your servers, scale it up.
With Digital Ocean, scaling up the resources is a piece of cake.
So, if you are going to start your own website for business then this is the starting point. No better VPS at this price range
In my opinion, $5 is easily affordable for everyone, PLUS you get a $10 Dollar credit for signing up with this link. I would strongly recommend you buy your first droplet from DigitalOcean because of its affordability and the fact that it gives you the complete platform to build on to. ]
You will learn a lot of things which are required to maintain and optimize your website in the long run.
- Basics to know before starting any website.
- Get a Personal Portfolio Website Now!
- Best Web Hoster: HostGator VS DreamHost [Web Hosting Comparison]
Powerful Droplets
The droplet is just a term DigitalOcean use to identify its Virtual Machines.
Each droplet is a virtual machine which has its own power, memory, space and bandwidth. It is not like Shared Hosting where your website starts to slow down as more people join the network.
In DigitalOcean VMs, the memory is not shared between droplets, rather each VM has its own memory and CPU. So you get all the power you pay for.
With $5 Droplet, you get 512MB 1GB Memory and 20GB?25GB SSD Disk Space, 1TB Transfer plus Ubuntu 16.04.1 x64 operating system. (if you are a tech guy, I can imagine the big fat smile on your face :D)
Let me represent it in a tabular format.
| Memory | 512MB |
| Disk Space | 20GB SSD |
| Bandwidth | 1TB |
| Operating System | Ubuntu 16.XX.X- x64 |
| CPU Usage Monitoring | YES (Graphical Representation) |
| Bandwidth Usage | YES (Graphical Time Series) |
| Disk I/O Usage | YES (Graphical Trend Chart) |
| Promo/Credits/Discount | YES ($10 Credit)
Sign Up link below… |
| Sign Up Link | Sign Up for Droplet! |
You also get a powerful DigitalOcean real-time monitoring for CPU Usage, Bandwidth Usage and Disk I/O usage for you registered droplet. Check out the image below:
One-click Droplet Backup
The most important feature of Dropbox is One-click Droplet Backup.
The one-click droplet backup feature creates a snapshot of your existing droplet and copies it safely in the cloud.
Once you select droplet backup by clicking on the button, it will start an automatic backup of your droplet once every week and save you all the hassle of backing it up by yourself.
You will have to pay a nominal $1 fee for this task but it’s worth it. Believe me, you will need this feature once your website grows out-of-bounds and your data becomes your wealth.
I personally have not used this feature of DigitalOcean because I use external ways to handle backup of my website and data.
I have signed up for this feature because of increase in my website’s traffic and data. Didn’t want to compromise the security and reliability of website at any given point in time.
I strongly recommend you to leverage this feature and enable the backup from the first day.
There is only one thing that you need to do. Press the Big Blue button from your DigitalOcean’s dashboard.
Refer the image below.
Easy Resource Management
Your website requirements change over time. DigitalOcean is best at handling such requirements so your website won’t experience any downtime.
You can easily scale or de-scale your resources just with a click. You want more memory, just click on the More button from your admin panel and select Resize Droplet.
Select the type of resource you want to increase or decrease and it will reflect in your current droplet in less than 5 minutes. Simply restart your droplet and your resources will be there.
I want to share my experience when this single click scalability feature helped me big time.
My website was attacked with loads of simultaneous requests By the time I came to know of the attack, my website was already down. At first, I wasn’t even aware that my website has been attacked. But, when I saw the log monitor and saw a rise in CPU and memory usage, the picture was pretty clear.
At that moment the only thing I could think of was to increase the resources of my droplet to up the website and I did that.
The website was up in about 10 minutes (it was the complete time from the moment I received JetPack mail that my website is down).
Once the website was up, I looked for the source of the attack in the logs. I blocked multiple IP addresses and monitored the performance for one hour. When everything looked okay, I lowered the resources and everything was back to normal.
That time I actually realized the necessity of one-click resource management.
On top of that, DigitalOcean charges you on the basis of hours, so my cost didn’t go high. That was awesome.
Host Multiple Websites with No Extra Cost
One of the main reason I use DigitalOcean is that it’s hassle-free. You just have to purchase it once and you can host whatever you feel like and whenever you feel like. You do not need to pay anything extra other than the rental charges.
Currently, I’ve hosted 5 different websites on a single droplet and it is all good. The response time is excellent.
Trust me, you get all of this in a single package.
You must be thinking- “Varun, you are a tech guy. You play with servers all the time in your office. All the things that you said sound easy and exciting to you but what about non-techy guys like me? It would take me hours just to get started with it, doesn’t it?”
And the answer is YES. You need technical knowledge of the server before you can set up your own website on your domain.
But there is a good option.
You can hire a freelancer to do it for you for very less. On top of that, it would be a one-time fee to set up your website.
It makes it even better when compared with other hosting providers where you get a restricted environment and you pay a lot more for a lot less. I’m a technical person and I would choose DigitalOcean anytime. I really love to be in control of everything.
There are a lot of things that I have done with DigitalOcean. I have set up server-side caching, content g-zip compression and multiple cron jobs that do certain tasks at certain intervals (periodically), such as Website Content Backup.
I get to take leverage of all these things at a much lower cost as compared to other shared-hosting providers.
As I have mentioned before, DigitalOcean team is really good when it comes to helping their customers.
On top of that, DigitalOcean community is huge and growing up quickly. There is very less chance of not finding an answer to your question. At least I have not faced such a situation in my experience.
Community Support
The only thing that makes any person or business great is its community and DigitalOcean has a huge community to help you with almost every problem.
There are tons of articles and discussions to help you with almost everything.
Simply by visiting their community page, you will learn about a lot of different topics and articles that will help you improve your technical skills.
I always spend my time reading these articles to improve my knowledge and skills.
When I was first starting with DigitalOcean, the community articles and discussions really helped me a lot. Right from setting up a LAMP Stack on my droplet to optimizing it, community articles was there to help me. I’m in love with digital ocean because of its powerful servers, affordable pricing and all time available community to solve all my doubts and problems.
Subscribe to BMA and get access to my library of free resources.
Instantaneous Support
The second most important thing that I look for in any service provider is its customer support. A bad support may leave you in the worst situations and can even compromise your business. But that is not the case with DigitalOcean. It has world-class customer support that is active 24×7.
Before making a purchase I always read about the customer service reviews of any service. This develops my trust in the provider and builds my confidence that they will be there for me when I need them.
I can assure you that they will be there to support you anytime you need.
An incident where I was facing a problem. The problem was occurring intermittently. So I contacted them with the complete description of the problem. In less than, 24 hours they came up with a solution and when I implemented it, the issue got resolved.
$100 Credit On Sign Up
You want to try out DigitalOcean with the minimum before you set up your website and understand its different aspects, well, I have got a $100 credit for you.
Sign Up with the below link to avail $100 credit
You will have to make your first purchase in order to get your $100 credit. The best advice, sign up with a $5 dollar droplet. You will immediately get $10 credit in your account which you can use for the next 20 months. This way you will be using DigitalOcean for 20 months in just $5.
It is a great deal.
If you have any question or doubt, feel free to comment below or contact me directly. I would love to work for you to set up a website on DigitalOcean.
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