Hi All, I 'm looking at setting up a VPS service with Digital Ocean (I believe they are a spon...

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking at setting up a VPS service with Digital Ocean (I believe they are a sponsor of the TWiT network). From my reading, a VPS is essentially a Dedicated Server, but with shared resources. I was looking to start with one of their $5 droplet servers to play around on (I'm still new to server management, although I've been learning a bit on my RP2), with the intention of moving the 3 low traffic websites I currently have on a hosted platform over, and maybe even add an OwnCloud service.

 

Questions:

 

1. DO is a decent service? Anyone have any issues to share?

2. Will the performance of the $5 be sufficient? If not, would is the minimum sufficient level from a performance standpoint?

3. If I need any correction in my thinking, please feel free to set me right :)

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet

[G+_Ben Reese]

In my experience, DO has been an excellent provider! Their prices are very competitive and I think you can get decent performance from the $5/mo plan. I'm pretty sure they can scale up (probably not down though), so you should be able to upgrade later if you want.

 

The only issue you may have with the cheapest plan is in the 512 MB RAM. Most of the mail servers I've seen like to have at least 1 GB, but it's worth the try. OwnCloud should perform fine too - mine is running on a VM with 768 MB.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Ben Reese thanks. Just so I can fully understand, you run you OwnCloud on a VM on your DO server? and would it be best to have it running in a VM on that server (in order to separate it), or could it just live among everything else?

 

Still a noob here..ha ha

[G+_Ben Reese]

I'm running ownCloud on a VirtualBox VM hosted from my PC/Server at home. I'm a bit too cheap to pay even $5/mo when I can do the same thing at home. I had a lot of DigitalOcean credit that I got for free, so I played quite a bit.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

ha ha, I hear you. I don't have a separate machine at home that I can dedicate to my server learning unfortunately.

[G+_Ben Reese]

I can't really recommend them at all - especially compared to DO, but I've recently bought space at CloudAtCost - again, because I'm cheap. When I signed up with CaC, it took a couple days for my account to be setup. Then went in to create a machine, and it took a few days for that to be built. I canceled the Centos build after a couple days and requested Debian instead - that was up in a couple hours. The only real advantage to CaC is cost. One time $35 is pretty awesome if you can put up with poor service.

 

DO was the opposite experience. Account was created immediately and machines are built in seconds instead of days. Their support responds in a timely manner. And they're building a library of tutorials - some I've used for other "how do I do this in Linux" stuff.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

For Nextcloud hosting, you really can't beat vultr.com - Vultr: High Performance SSD Cloud. and the storage instances. $5/month gets you 50GB of storage, and enough cpu/ram to run the service. That's where I had mine until I got my own server.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Travis Hershberger? Ben Reese? both Vultr and DO allow me to install my own installation of Linux and have access via command line or gui? Right? Just a final check.

 

Also, I found very mixed reviews with Vultr, but I guess that's to be expected with all. Apparently their support is not amazing. But may be worth a try, especially since I can get twice the ram for the same price as DO. And I'm cheap too... Lol

[G+_Chris Druif (Automated]

Any reason to use OwnCloud over Nextcloud btw?

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Chris Druif?? I didn't know there was a Next cloud :) still a server noob, and have all these ideas that I'm hoping to achieve off a single VPS. Not sure if it will work: hosting about 5 very low traffic sites, cloud storage and VPN.

[G+_Chris Druif (Automated]

Darryl Gibbs it probably will, biggest hurdle will probably CPU load. Because DO has excellent networking and they only use SSD storage. So CPU and RAM will be probably the biggest problem to deal with.

[G+_Ben Reese]

I'd recommend Vestacp to manage the sites. It will do daily backups of the sites and their DBs. I've got 2 or 3 sites running on the junky CaC server and they run ok for dev sites - as expected with CaC.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Ben Reese? I install this onto the server to help manage it? (I'll do more reading into it obviously)

[G+_Ben Reese]

NextCloud is a branch off ownCloud. It's probably got a few more features, but I'm still using OwnCloud because it seems a little easier to install and update. I've seen a lot of people say NextCloud is better - just never heard why.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Yeah, Vestacp will install to the clean server and give you a CPanel type of configuration dashboard. You can add users and each user can have multiple sites and databases. I don't think you can setup multiple users per site, but you can have multiple sites per user.

 

It has a name server built-in if you want to use that, but I'm still just using the Namecheap name server.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

But having this would then not allow me to install Ubuntu right? I'm seeing I may need multiple VPS s now.. Ha ha. It's hard to be so cheap. ;)

[G+_Ben Reese]

Hehe... No, this installs on top of Centos, Debian, Ubuntu... Whatever image you want to start with. By "clean server", I mean just a server OS you haven't installed anything else on. It will install MySQL, Fail2Ban, PHP, Apache, Nginx, and several other packages. Having those installed beforehand will throw errors.

 

I seem to remind having to tweak a few things to get Vesta to install correctly. Like maybe Debian came with PHP installed already or something.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Ok cool, I'll give it a bash. And before installing I'll remove any of those mentioned packages should then exist already. Thanks for the help!

[G+_Ben Reese]

No problem! I think it will let you know before installing if there are dependency issues and I'm pretty sure there are command line switches to ignore some of the errors. I've only installed a couple times, so don't remember how it all went...

[G+_Chris Druif (Automated]

First of all, most of the founders and main developers of OwnCloud moved to Nextcloud when the branching off happened (I think that is a significant reason why NC is better than OC).

 

Secondly a lot out standing bugs have quickly been dealt with after the branching. Also most of the premium features of the paid version of OC have been rebuild in by them. Nextcloud is completely open source compared to the open core model of OwnCloud.

 

Those are just a few of the reasons I know from the top of my head Ben Reese?

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Darryl Gibbs I never had to use support when I was running with Vultr, so I can't answer that question.

 

As for uploading your own Linux distro to use, I know vultr.com - Vultr: High Performance SSD Cloud. lets you upload your own iso to use.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Chris Druif and Darryl Gibbs NextCloud is a fork of OwnCloud, only with a much quicker development cycle. They're rolling out lots of features and integrations. Things like Collabora (Libre Office Online) and OnlyOffice integration. You can have your own version of Office365.

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Well my credit card is being rejected by Vultr, and VISA and my bank claim innocence. So, Travis Hershberger , let's see how good their service is then! ha ha

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Darryl Gibbs I've spent half my career dealing with credit card processing, it's the issuing bank almost every time, and service providers have no way to work with them to figure it out :(

[G+_Darryl Gibbs]

Well turns out it's Vultr's anti-fraud something or other.. but the solution is easy enough. so hopefully tomorrow morning when their finance dept returns it will all be settled.