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9 Comments

Cheap MongoDB hosting

Hi,

I would like to know how do you approach hosting your MongoDB database. I know the free Atlas tier is generous, however, it's not well suited for production.
The paid tier from Atlas starts at around 60$ a month (i believe it charges per hour) which I find rather expensive especially for a bootsrapper.
What are the cheaper options, apart from self hosting, from your experience?

Thank you.

  1. 3

    I use Mongo Atlas $60 tier. If you're ok with shared clusters they have a $9/month for 2gb storage or $25/month for 5gb.

    1. 1

      Thank you.

      Can you give an idea about the traffic the 9$ option can handle.
      Also, is it easy to cancel or is there a minimum subscription term?

      1. 1

        Not sure about traffic, probably not a good idea for mission-critical stuff.

  2. 2

    You can self-host for $5 on a VPS box, but really, you need your db as close to your application servers as possible...

    IMHO, pay the $60. its not worth your time to deal with migrating data around. If your biz model can't support a $60/mo prod db, then you need to be addressing that problem first and not trying to pinch pennies on server costs.

  3. 2

    Unless you have a need for a specific MongoDB feature. I would look at using AWS' NoSQL DynamoDB. Since it's pay per usage, any development usage should fit in their free tier. I run a production system that add 10,000's of documents a month and the bill is < $10.

  4. 2

    Unfortunately, Mongo has changed some of their licensing in recent years to make it harder for competitors to offer hosting services. AWS started offering a NoSQL DB as a result that’s semi-compatible with Mongo. Mongo Corp also bought one of their only competitors, mLab, a year or so back.

    So, I don’t think there’s many alternatives to Atlas due to those reasons.

    If you’re using SQL, you’ll have lot more alternatives. 🙃

  5. 1

    I'm using MongoDB Atlas but I think you don't need a dedicated cluster right away.
    You can start with shared clusters : M2 with 2Gb storage is 9$/month and M5 with 5Gb storage is 25$/month.

    The good thing is you can very easily upgrade your cluster in one click once your project grows.

    Unfortunately it is not currently active, but they also offer a startup program: https://www.mongodb.com/startups

  6. 1

    Personally I would look at AWS and either self host MongoDB on a EC2 instance or consider DynamoDB. Quite easy to get AWS credits to cover the first 2 years costs.

  7. 1

    It's pretty easy to setup and run a small production db on DigitalOcean. If you host your app there as well, then you have the added benefit of being able to completely isolate that server from the public network and firewall it to your private network.

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