Save $10 on DigitalOcean VPS hosting

I recently needed to set up a ssh forwarding server for a project of mine. As I don’t have any permanently running server set up I set up a VPS hosting with DigitalOcean. You can set up an account here to get a $10 free credit to test their services (this is my referral link, if you do not want to support my blog you can just google their name to get set up – I think you may get some promotional credit even without using the link). The VPS hosting is quite reliable and the prices are really nice. A friend of mine is paying 90EUR just for rack space for his server in a much smaller server colocation facility. Currently VPS for that money would well outpreform his server configuration.

On the lowest preformance settings the $10 credit will enable you to run the server for two months 🙂 And if you devote some time to server setup and optimisation even the cheapest 512M server will be fully capable of runing a few sites with moderate traffic. DigitalOcean has a nice database of articles on setup of the various server configurations to help you get started. Lol, now I am starting to sound like a salesman, so I will just stop here and leave the reader to do some research on his own.

Shortly I will be writing a post on setting up a ssh forwarding server and what is can be used for.

And just for those that do not know what a VPS is: VPS is abbreviation for virtual private server. It is an equivalent of having a private web/internet server without the need to wory about the actual hardware. The hardware is “virtualised” which means that your server application actually runs on a much bigger server / server farm, but you can only use the amount of resources you pay for. The big advantage of virtualisation is that you don’t have to worry about hardware problems as the provider cares for that, also “hardware changes/updates” can be applied without the need for shutting down your server.

The server is private – you are in full control of it – so you have to take care for software updates, this may be either an advantage or a disadvantage depending how you look on it. On some hosts you may also choose managed virtual private server, what this means is that the system is set up to apply the security updates automatically. However if you only want to have a webserver it may be easier to only set up a hosting with a web hosting provider.