Managed Hosting or DigitalOcean+Forge?

I think DO just do the VPS and provide very little in the way of support services (from memory anyway). Linode or Rackspace do VPS+management afair though - not sure of the pricing and their websites aren't very clear :-/

Maybe go with something managed for the $$ project and bare VPS for your personal one to learn how what you need to know? @fideloper 's servers for hackers is a good resource :-)

Kind of depends what the $$ project needs in terms of support though - 99.99999% uptime, disaster recovery, scaling etc? Or just "doesn't crash and burn on a regular basis"? ;-)

It's mainly so it doesn't crash and burn, or get hacked ☺

It's a service where providers will put in their digital products and can then distribute them to merchandises who can buy them and sell them to customers. It's a decent sized Laravel project that I think will run smoothly and doesn't require anything special except a stable server.

Do+Forge is decently secure, the downside is that you still have to monitor it. I've used some small monitoring tools to alert me about memory usage, disk space and updates so that I can set-and-forget it for 90% of the tasks.

In the worst case scenario (and I mean terribly bad scenarios) you can reset the machine and install it from scratch. If you have a backup solution you just reset the machine and tells forge to reinstall everything, then load the backup. Probably it'll be quicker then waiting for the support team in a managed solution. Of course downtime costs money, but it depends on project size, you don't pay 1000$/year for a 10 visitors blog to have 0 downtime.

Have you ever tried something like Heroku, Google App Engine or any other Platform-as-a-Service? I've never had the time to try them out with Laravel, but Heroku sounds really nice. Does anyone have use it before?

I would go with a VPS+Forge for you're personal project and Heroku for the bigger one.

Let us know what you end up choosing, quite interested in it :)

Do you have any 'slack' lead-in time? You could see how you get on with a regular DO/Linode VPS and forge I guess - if it feels ok then run with it :-) I've been doing sysadmin stuff for so long I kind of forget how much I know about all the weirdnesses and 'oh yeah, that'll break if you do that' stuff ;-)

I seem to remember that forge will auto-enable security updates etc so you'd only have to keep half an eye on that. I usually disable auto-updating as it's bitten me in the past though (some library updates, which then breaks something else that should have restarted to pick up the change, which then.... etc etc ;-)

I've got a few low-traffic sites on DO and never had an issue with them. They're pretty good at emailing you if there's going to be a network upgrade or whatever that might give you some downtime - but I think I've had like 5 minutes downtime in 3+ years with them.

They don't really offer 'real' private networking, dynamic scaling or the like - but sounds like you don't really need that just now (phew!) :-)

I guess backups would be your main worry for a 'oh, it's crashed and burned'. You can easily do full image backups with DO etc, but might be wise to have a small low-end box running that keeps a current-ish copy of the site & db if it's a for-money 'hello angry customer! hi!' kinda thing ;-)

Do you have any 'slack' lead-in time?

I don't know what that means? ☺

Thank you guys for your replies ♥ I think the best option is as you both suggest, that I separate them and use managed VPS or a service like Heroku for the bigger one and DO + Forge for the smaller one, and backup like crazy on both servers ☺

Good luck! If your project goes well and you become a millionaire, remember us! ;-)

@ohffs thank you buddy, rich or poor, will never forget you ☺♥

Aww :-) :: punches you manfully on the shoulder :: ;-)

I generally launch on do with forge and envoyer. As the needs go up you can always upgrade with a few button clicks. As your need expands you can easily vertically scale or transfer over to aws.

I don't suggest aws off the bat usually as it is expensive for small/new projects but if your using s3 now for storage, it might be an option for you.

Also look into new relic. It offers not only analytic data but server information including memory and cpu usage along with network and query data. Google but on steroids.

For cdn instead of s3 I use Google's. Good php sdk/API and a lot cheaper then s3. But the caveat is in China and other parts of the world most of Google is blocked.

Thanks @jekinney, my recent experience is limited to shared hosting and a VPS with CPanel. I will start with DO+Forge for my personal project and see where it leads and maybe I can update my server skills a bit.

New Relic looks very interesting, I recently watched this video but I don't get how it gets all that info. Do you have to install something on the server or is it already installed on DO or does Forge install it?

No not with forge, just follow the tutorial. Otherwise: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/servers/new-relic-servers-linux/installation-configuration/servers-installation-ubuntu-debian

Edit I guess Taylor removed the monitoring tab, but just ssh into the server and copy/paste the commands.

Hm, I signed up for New Relic then when I go to Forge monitoring tab, New Relic is gone and instead there is Blackfire.io..

https://i.imgur.com/OmggF7I.jpg

Edit: Ok, this was pretty awesome. I added my server credentials and then installed this Chrome extension and now I can go to my site and click a button in Chrome toolbar and get tons of info.

I have to say I'm amazed by how smooth this whole process was.

I haven't touched *nix in over a decade and within the hour I have a VPS up and running with SSL for my domain, connected to Git with auto update for any changes I push to my repository.

I chose the smallest VPS package to start with and yet the site loads faster than on my local machine ☺

Yay :-) You'll end up with Linux on your desktop yet! ;-)

@ohffs It's inevitable, just a question of how long I can endure this thing they call Windows. Once I have more time I'll try update my skills, I've noticed a lot of companies require Linux knowledge for programming jobs as well.