Why I moved my VPS from Digital Ocean to Contabo + almost free backup at AWS S3

There are many options where you can host your app, but if you are just in a validation phase, you probably do not want to spend much money on it.

Digital Ocean

When I was looking for a hosting a year ago, I went with Digital Ocean (DO). Their basic VPS instance ($5 / month) seems reasonable for what you get. I have never had any problems with them, none, everything works.

However, I recently launched my last project Webstore Insight and I hit the “performance wall.” I am running a database, another database, web apps, a couple of scripts in the background, all that on a single VPS instance.

It didn’t take me a long time to realize that only 1 CPU, 1 GB of memory and 20 GB of SSD storage is simply not going to be enough to run it smoothly.

So, I went to my DO dashboard and look how much does it cost to make it a bit better than it currently is. And here is the problem with DO, their basic plan is cheap, anything better than basic is the exact opposite of cheap.

Let’s look at their pricing.

| CPUs [#] | Memory [GB] | SSD [GB] | Transfer [GB] | Price [$ / month] |
|----------|-------------|----------|---------------|-------------------|
| 1        | 1           | 20       | 1000          | 5                 |
| 2        | 4           | 25       | 4000          | 20                |
| 4        | 8           | 25       | 5000          | 40                |
| 6        | 16          | 25       | 6000          | 80                |

As you can see the price is going up quite steeply.

But the even more surprising thing is… you cannot find an upgrade with more SSD capacity. Simply because they want you to pay extra $ for the storage (you can buy volume for about $10 / month for 100 GB).

Just to be fair here, I would not have any problem to pay DO more money if I am running a profitable business already and not just testing the waters (but even in that case I would probably leave them for AWS).

I understand that they must make money somehow and they cannot just sell their VPS ultra-cheap, however, this is exactly what Contabo is doing.

Contabo

I tried VPS from Contabo after I read several reviews of their extremely happy customers.

Now I know why they were so happy.

Let’s compare what you get in their basic plan for the same price ($5 / month) at Contabo.

| CPUs [#] | Memory [GB] | SSD [GB] | Transfer [GB] | Price [$ / month] |
|----------|-------------|----------|---------------|-------------------|
| 4        | 8           | 200      | Unlimited     | 5                 |
| 6        | 16          | 400      | Unlimited     | 9                 |
| 8        | 30          | 800      | Unlimited     | 15                |
| 10       | 60          | 1600     | Unlimited     | 27                |

I will leave an in-depth price comparison to you, but basically you will get 4x CPU, 8x memory, 10x SSD capacity for the same price in the basic plan at Contabo.

The only downside of the Contabo’s basic plan is the connection speed. It is 200Mb / s, instead of 1000Mb / s at Digital Ocean.

But here is the thing, if you have tens of thousand customers an hour then you are not testing the waters, you are onto something. Go and get a better instance with a bandwidth of 1Gb / s ($27 per month at Contabo).

Migration from Digital Ocean to Contabo

It was smooth.

I am running everything in Docker, so it was with no problems at all. I just had to rebuild my images, migrate databases, and change DNS entries (about 1 hour of work).

Backup Solution

Contabo provides SFTP as well as FTPs servers for backups. However, they are priced at $4 / month for 100GB and they are tied to a location. That means you cannot use the same FTP for one server in Europe and another one in USA.

There are certainly better and cheaper backup options out there than Contabo, one of them is AWS S3.

If you are using Docker (WHICH YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD) you just run the backup image and list what you want to backup and that’s it.

With S3 you can do a backup from how many VPS and locations you want without any limitation. It is basically free for one year and after that, you have to pay $0.0135 per GB of storage.

I don’t know how much data you have to back up, but for me, it will not be more than a couple of GBs (< $1 / month) and I can sleep well knowing that AWS will probably not lose my data or go bankrupt in a year (just my humble prediction).

If you are interested in what Docker images I am running for a backup (or interested in anything else) just leave a comment I will gladly provide more info.