Shopping Day
My current company website runs in squarespace. I have no complaint at all. It has a very good design, UX is awesome and with ecommerce capability. However, it can’t be a platform, or a community based website. It just can’t.
So, naturally, under the blueprint of emmarvel, I need a platform that can be a community based ecommerce capability. We need a good one that could easily programmed as we want and tons of plugins that fulfill the very basic requirement in my plan (do I have a plan at all?)
Firstly, of course I need a hosting. There’s no way I will try to host on my own nowadays. I did back 10–15 years ago, but not now. I’ve already short listed a few from my experience, Alibabacloud, Google GCP, Rackspace or maybe DigitalOcean. They are all renowned, well known and easy to scale. When I look back my notebook, it’s easily to choose from, that just choose one that could go live in a day, costing is low enough to manage the investment and yet reliable.
AlibabaCloud has a very bad UX over the calculator, which always confuse me on the bundle and package they have. I see the price point for vCPU is from $0.091, hasn’t taken account of storage. Just a little bit hesitation. Good thing is to upgrade each part of it individually and the bottom line is “China” perspective. They host in China, a big plus.
Google GCP got plenty of choice, but the starting price point of is much higher. I may use their app engine for machine learning later, but as simple as a starting point for testing out business model, I may not go for it at this point. I am so familiar with Wordpress and it’s so easy to migrate the content. So, if one day I need to move, I just move.
Rackspace takes me a time to browse over their offer, seems they don’t do business for someone like me.
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Lastly, DigitalOcean looks very flexible to me. They provide an interesting image structure called droplet. It has much easier plan who is looking for flexible start.
Well, it takes my heart immediately. $15 to start now, why not?
So, it took me like 20 minutes to signup and get the droplet (image) to start up! Woohoo!
Not too long after filling in some basic info, I have my wordpress up and running!
Summary: you don’t need to be an expert to get your first server up and running in hour. I’ve spent about $53 for securing 2 domains (emmarvel.co and emmarvel.com for 2 years. Get DigitalOcean $100 credit for spending and testing.
