How do you pick which VPS plan fits your needs?
Hey folks,
So I recently decided to drop off Heroku and have my next website running on a VPS! I'll host it and I'll set up the MongoDB myself.
But as a beginner at VPS I'm not sure which one is the best to start with! I was reading a Medium post that recommended 20$ and some other people recommends something relatively smaller like 5 or 10!
And I'm not sure what to look for picking my VPS really, since I don't even think that I'll be able to make use of the 20GB in the starting plan anyway since I'm using S3 for photos and videos.
How do you decide these things smarter people? 🤔
If you are a beginner at VPS, know that there is a significant sysadmin overhead (especially in production) to managing your own server and you will probably have to learn basic Linux skills to make things work.
I wouldn't worry about the technical specs just yet, but focus on the quality of the service provider and ease of use/management.
I'd recommend DigitalOcean for these reasons:
You can get a 2GB box for $10/mo.
Would you recommend any tutorials out of DO's docs tho?
Upgrading is easy (clicking a button). Downgrading is not.
Generally the issue with ultra low end VPSes is they don't have enough memory to run databases. But if you know your requirements well, you can go pretty cheap (my personal site and some demo apps are hosted on a $2.50 Vultr). Not familiar with MongoDB in particular, so you might try asking those folks what they'd recommend.
The $2.50 plan at vultr is very limited in availability, i've logged into my account every few months and they are usually all snapped up.. Great deal though if you can get it.. but for a DB you'd want more ram.
For small teams, I would recommend a PaaS provider like Heroku, or even shared hosting, over a VPS, unless you have an engineer on you team to handle ops and infrastructure work. There's many things that take time and expertise to get right (provisioning, security, metrics, logging, backups, horizontally scaling up/down, deployments, patches, upgrades, etc.).. especially when you're running a system open to the public web.
Why did you decide to leave Heroku? Personally, I think in most cases even if you're going to save a few $10s a month, you'll easily burn that on a VPS in terms of admin and extra development costs.
I personally had no problems at all with Heroku, it's just their upgrades when you want to scale is pretty ridiculous.
also I've seen a couple of people saying that Heroku's entry plan couldn't handle some hundreds of visitors, I haven't gotten to this stage with Heroku myself to be honest I only used it for freelance but I just wanted to choose the best option.
I have a comparison of cheap VPS options: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/dd5c0a813dfe4487a6cd432f82c0c2fc/comparing-prices-of-vps-servers.html
They all are much cheaper than Heroku.
That being said, I'm not a fan of over-optimizing on cost. $5 vs $20 vs $40 should make no difference in your life and $20 Digital Ocean server is more than enough for most services.
That being said, if you a have a need for somewhat powerful server for less than $60, Scaleway and Hetzner have really cheap plans.
I think the best way to know is to wait until you outgrow.
Just use whatever meets your requirements right now and scale later.
I'm just curious why do people later scale to bigger plans? Do websites actually get that big size wise? Or is it the CPU and Bandwidth that matters?
I have a recent experience about this that I can share.
A week ago, I launched Makerlog on Product Hunt, and got to #3 Top of the Day.
The influx of traffic essentially made my server run extremely slow and crash, so I had to scale up from $5 to $10, then when the influx stopped, back again.
You scale according to how you grow, and depending on circumstance (sometimes unexpected things happen!).
Could the website not be static hosted on something like Netlify for free? I made #3 on Product Hunt as well with https://www.checkbot.io/ and didn't have to give uptime a second thought that way. I go with static sites where I can and something more high-level like Heroku when I can't.
Well done though, good problem to have. 😄
How much traffic did PH send at the peak?
Max 2-3k, and 480 signups. Pretty good stuff!
2-3k concurrently, 2-3k per second or was it over some longer time interval?
Over the whole spotlight.
In all fairness, I did do a lot of emergency performance patches after encountering some badly-written parts.
Thanks. I just had no idea what to expect there. At least as of last year, I understand hitting the top of HN will get you to ~400 users concurrently (as measured by Google Analytics).
480 signups is really good though and sound like PH was well worth it!
That's great, congrats on 3rd!! 🎉
I've 1 more question if you don't mind, is VPS actually faster than a host? Because I'm pretty sure I have read that somewhere
Thanks!
And it depends on your requirements. In most cases it is, although depending on programming stack and scale you may not need it.
What's your stack and how much traffic do you receive right now?
Oh it's not actually deployed yet, I meant that I used Heroku before as a freelancer but it's my first time ever deploying my own business that's why I want to make it be as good as I could. :>
and my stack is MERN ( Mongo, Express, React, Node )
And I'd expect a couple of thousands hopefully!
Then definitely go with a VPS. Heroku gets crazy expensive crazy fast, and with something like Fabric for deployments, you can automate most of them. :P
If you need any help getting set up or any other questions don't hesitate to DM me on Twitter. :)
That's great, really appreciate it Sergio! 👋💛
You can try Digital Ocean they offer a 100$ credit for 60 days, during which you can very well understand your requirements and usage.. I did the same and settled for a 15$/pm droplet .
I didn't know that! great, thanks.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
a kind of silly question tho, how to I connect between the 2 servers?