Get free $100 in cloud credits from DigitalOcean
Hi everyone, if you never heard of me before, I’m a programmer with 10 years of learning and coding experience now, my name’s Besso and I work as a freelancer while also having other passive income sources which I’ve built over the years.
Strangely enough, I’ve heard about DigitalOcean, AWS EC2 and Microsoft Azure many times on Youtube or in different tutorials, but I never really considered using those for my (relatively) small projects unless I needed to scale them up considerably, well, until just recently.
Recently I was building a very interesting project which required dedicated server-like functionality — full control over the settings as my shared hosting’s default settings were incompatible. Before trying to upgrade to VPS from my existing shared hosting plan, I decided to look for alternatives for comparison, but I found that basically all VPS providers have non-flexible, very high prices, generally cloud versions cost even more and I had a very painful experience building a server (non-managed VPS) from scratch for one of my clients.
Even if you’re familiar with Linux, I think setting up a Linux server from scratch is super hard — ordering separate vendor-level DNS routing from the vendor company, setting phpMyAdmin, PHP, MySQL, email server, email routing, VPS-level virtual domains. The thing is it’s very important to have basic step-by-step tutorials, as programmers, we’re no server administrators, we don’t have time to learn the documentation of every single service that should run on the server for it to support our software properly, you may be much smarter than me, and all this may be a piece of cake for you, I don’t know, I know I’m not good with everything, I’m not good with most of the things actually, so after a lot of trial and error, I found out that iRedMail is an excellent all-in-one and free package for setting the server up on a clean/fresh Linux server VPS. You don’t even need configuring much if you’re gonna run everyday normal stuff, web applications, email, MySQL, phpMyAdmin etc..
But this was for one of my clients, it wasn’t everyday normal stuff (although iRedMail made things easier) and I didn’t want to go down the same path once again unless I really had to, hence I decided to give cloud platforms a try, I stumbled upon Cloudways in the beginning, a “man-in-the-middle” kind of business which offers managing all your AWS, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud accounts from one dashboard, although when I did a research, I found that they add a 100% markup on any service… really?
I also did the price comparison for similar offers from Amazon, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean was long way ahead of all in terms of pricing so I purchased a $5 package there and created a Ubuntu Server 16.04 droplet. One of the downsides of cloud platforms is that they’re more expensive than traditional shared web hostings, although I discovered that DigitalOcean pricing was not only beating the competition, but same amount of resources (CPU, Storage, Bandwidth) were almost 2 times more expensive with my current shared hosting provider. I was nearly in love.
Then I had to set up all the LAMP stuff — existing Ubuntu Linux 16.04 Server OS + Apache HTTP server + MySQL and PHP, well, let’s not forget the email, DNS and SSL certificates. Standard setup is not that difficult, what’s difficult is making sure everything woks seamlessly with the specific environment and when it comes to the documentation, DigitalOcean is amazing with its massive amount of step-by-step articles of highest possible quality I can imagine, that just work the way they’re supposed to.
What’s even more awesome is that same tutorials have different versions for Ubuntu Server 18, 16, 14 and other operating systems.
If I had an article likes this one, it would’ve saved me a great deal of time researching different offers, I hope it does for you, in addition, if you register now with this link, you get $100 in credit over 60 days.
Enjoy! and thanks for reading!