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So basically I am launching a new company and not sure how to select a correct server size or if I should eveen go serverless. We are going to be an E-com site that only sells our product. I would assume traffic will be light at first but would like to be seeing 5k-10k transactions a month after the first year. I chose Laravel since I am more versed in this than something like Shopify and I like being able to control all the code and use the site as place for vendor orders, internal management, cms, really everything. Knowing that I am still unsure what is the best size Digital Ocean server to use or is something like Vapor even a better option. I know we are going to be small at first but also dont want to have the site or something go down because we hit a hot streak. Any suggestions on what to do? Start with a small server and then move to serverless after seeing what our traffic is? Can the smallest DO server still handle a decent amount?
@packy start with the smallest server ensuring you have a package that can be increased in size as your needs require,
There’s little point in buying an expensive package and only using 1 % of it. Start lean and upgrade when you out grow your package.
start small, and also consider what your traffic might be like.
You can have 10K transactions per month on even the smallest box if it were one request and they were spread throughout the day/month
eg 1 month = 43200 minutes or one transaction every 4.5 minutes - this is nothing.
But suppose those 10000 transactions were bets on a baseball game where they were all placed in the 1 hour before the game starts. Now its 166 transactions per minute.
An extreme comparison, but I hope you get my point.
You have to pay for what you need now, study the traffic and the load on the server. Look for optimisations of the longest activities and consider scaling up when you reach 50% load. Fortunately Linode and DO make it easy to provision more memory or cpu, or move your database to its own server.
oh, and consider Vapor if your load is likely to be very 'peaky' eg a lot of users hitting your site all at once because of some external event (that baseball game) or you running a TV campaign etc. Vapor is at its most economic when you have long periods of no activity and then frantic activity when its auto-scaling comes into its own.
Thanks. This all makes sense to me now. I am by no means an expert with servers so wasnt sure what the capacity for even a small DO one is (or how its calculated). Looks like start small, study and move up if I see were are over 50% or if we know we might have some giant spike from a big ad placement.
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