Recently I developed a Django web application for a friend. I wanted to be able to get it up and out onto the internet so she could view it and get others to do user testing.
Normally I host my web applications on my Webfaction account. But I wanted to keep this project separate so I went over to Digital Ocean and spun up a virtual server to host the Django web application.
We didn’t have a domain name for this site yet so just used the Digital Ocean provided IP address to access the site and created a Self-Signed SSL Certificate for Apache and forced all traffic to HTTPS to enable secure browsing.
I have used Digital Ocean for development purposes and to share projects with others from time to time. I have also used Vultr.
- Digital Ocean – Use this link to open account and get $10 credit.
- Vultr – use this link to open account and get $20 credit (summer 2016 promotion).
Both have monthly price plans that can also be pro-rated depending on how many days you use them so you can spin them up for a few minutes or days and pay accordingly. I am using the basic plans on both which are good enough for my demonstration development web application purposes.
- Digital Ocean – $5 plan includes 1 cpu, 512MB of RAM, 20GB SSD storage and 1000GB Bandwidth
- Vultr – $5 plan includes 1 cpu, 768MB Memory, 15 GB SSD storage and 1000GB Bandwidth
Beware though that unlike the huge number of shared hosting such as Webfaction, Digital Ocean and Vultr virtual servers are yours to own and manage. You get root access to the server and are responsible for managing the server, OS, how it is configured and secured, etc.
That is definitely something you should consider. There are lots of new things to learn. However there are tutorials and lots of help available on the internet so l recommend at least attempting to setup either or both to learn first hand. The cost is small and risk very low. Knowledge gained and benefits are well worth it.
Many comparison reviews seem to prefer Vultr over Digital Ocean for performance and features. However Digital Ocean was first and has done excellent job of documentation for getting many web applications setup. But Vultr does have good documentation too. You can’t really go wrong with either for development projects. If you don’t like one, just switch to the other!