Remote Server Workflow

A few years ago, I discovered digitalocean, and I was subsequently given a lot of promotional credit. It worked, because I’m hooked now (like a digital fish, in a digital ocean?).

Here’s the deal: for $5/month you can spin up a very simple small server with root access, and a public facing IP. They advertise that it only takes 55 seconds, which is largely true. Do you just want a clean machine to test something on? Spin it up, get a drink, and when you come back you have root access.

Even better, you can create a snapshot of a machine just how you like it, and spin it up as necessary, paying just $0.02 per GB of snapshot storage per month. This gives great flexibility, at almost no cost.

Yes, but what about AWS? I honestly haven’t gone to the trouble of comparing services carefully. I know that digitalocean has transparent and reasonable pricing, and is simple to use, neither of which are true for AWS or Azure.