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Arth
Arth

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Lessons from moving DomeCode to DigitalOcean

Well, for starters, DomeCode is a coding platform that unifies the coding experience by providing all relevant resources and tools in a single platform and this post is a result of us, at DomeCode, shifting from Heroku ( after exhausting free credits ) to Digital Ocean ( still on free credits ).

In this post, I want to emphasize the importance of choosing the right cloud provider for you and saving up money by spending on only what you and your application really needs. If you're profitable and have enough money at disposal, this post might not make a huge difference for you but for those of you out there who're starting out and are on a tight budget, this might help.

The guidelines to help you : ( not a huge fan of constraints but these are actually helpful )

  • Exhaust all the free credits from any platform you can get your hands on.
    I went three months into Heroku for free until I got charged.
    Examples include for the majority of you out there, Linode, DigitalOcean, Azure, AWS, and GCP. All of these entertain some sort of free credit program and you can just go ahead and take advantage of these programs so you don't have to worry about the costs but rather, just your code.

  • Don't go for PaaS unless you absolutely need to or you have the credits/money to. Exceptions include services that wholly PaaS like Heroku. However, if you're on DigitalOcean, avoid the 'easy deployment' options using 'Apps' if possible. If you can do the deployment and configurations ( along with some sysadmin stuff ) yourself, you can potentially save yourself over 50%.

  • Pay for only the services you need, this is a no-brainer but still worth mentioning that you should only pay for the plan that you know your application is gonna end up using the resources equivalent of. For example, if you've just started working on a Node.js application with 200 users with light usage, it makes no sense to pay $60/month in most cases.

In simple words, by moving Heroku ( $7/mo dyno + $7mo worker + $50/mo database ) to DigitalOcean ( $5/month — setting it all up ). This potentially saved over 90% of the initial cost ( $5 instead of $64 a month ).

With that being said, it's ultimately upto you where you want to spend your budget ( if it's low ), the cloud when you can rather redeem credits or other places that make your product better?

My Github - https://github.com/arthtyagi

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