Question

Cheapest DigitalOcean plan that suits my requirements for a new Website

Posted on March 20, 2021
CentOS PostgreSQL
Asked by Vinay Kumar Rai

I’m writing to determine the cheapest DigitalOcean plan that suits my requirements for a new Website.

Elementum.asia will be selling eBooks in PDF format. Projected number of titles: 120 by end-2021, 480 by end-2022, 1560 by end-2023. Total stable number of titles: 3,000-9,000 titles, probably by end-2025. Projected sales (number of eBooks sold annually): 6,000 by end-2021, 72,000 by end-2022; 864,000 by end-2023; 3 million every year, stable-state.

Each eBook will typically be 250KB to 1MB in size. This includes the contents (text + images), cover, a thumbnail of the cover, some meta-data, and possibly the author’s image.

Most of my customers will initially come from the ‘West’ (USA, Canada, Europe, etc) but by end-2022 will come from all over the world. I’d prefer that my server be located in a neutral country (preferably Switzerland), if possible.

I will require a CMS (WordPress), an SQL database, and an eCommerce platform (WooCommerce or OpenCart), and prefer a GUI to manage everything, where relevant. I’ll also require secure communication (HTTPS).

What options do you recommend for me?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

alexdo

Site Moderator

• March 20, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hello, @vinayEel

You can definitely start with some of the smallest packages and upgrade in the future if this is needed. I will recommend choosing the Intel or AMD Premium Droplets option with 2GB RAM and 50GB NVMe SSD since you’re going to use WordPress alongside WooCommerce and this can sometimes consume more memory. This configuration should handle OpenCart as well. However as already mentioned if you ever need to upgrade in order to speed up the performance you can do that any time which is good to know before choosing the right package to start with.

You can easily secure the WordPress site with SSL using Let’s Encrypt SSL by following one of our tutorials here as well:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-20-04

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-20-04

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

Vinay Kumar Rai • March 22, 2021

Many thanks, Alex! The ability to upgrade settles it for me. I have a question re which option in “Intel or AMD Premium Droplets” to go for, but I’ll check out DO’s FAQs / documentation first to see if that topic’s covered there.

Cheers, Vinay