4 Questions. Pricing and what to choose

Hi @tefatenuta,

I’ll reply to your questions in the order you’ve asked them. If I miss somethings, please let me know and I’ll correct it.

1. DigitalOcean billing cycles are monthly only. Your account balance accrues over the course of the calendar month based on the cost of the resources you use. DigitalOcean is also required by law to apply taxes for certain countries. DigitalOcean automatically invoices and charges your account’s primary payment method on the first day of each month for the previous month’s usage, or partway through the month if you exceed your account’s usage threshold. You can read more about it here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/

2. The amount depends on the service/droplet you have and the network you use. Basically, in addition to your billing, you can be billed based on Bandwidth. Droplets include free outbound data transfer, starting at 1,000 GiB/month for the smallest plan. Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01/GiB. For example, the cost of 1,000 GiB of overage is $10. Inbound bandwidth to Droplets is always free. More about it here

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/

Let me summarize these two questions so far. On this page here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/

You can see all the droplets that are being provided. What I’ll recommend is to go for the smallest Basic Droplet. Almost all the time it will be enough for your needs, it’s the cheapest and can always be upgraded. The price as I can see currently is 5$ per month (without the bandwidth billing). I have such a droplet and my bills come about 7$ per month but that’s based on traffic.

3. In order to acquire a droplet, you need to create one from your control panel at https://cloud.digitalocean.com --> Create —> Choose your Droplet.

Having said that, I’ll recommend choosing one Droplet from the MarketPlace. It comes with everything you need pre-installed -

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/lamp

That’s the LAMP droplet, it comes with Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Fail2BAN, Postfix and Certbot. With these, you can have a website, e-mails, and everything needed to host a website.

4. Regarding mails, it is possible to use the Droplet for mails but I don’t recommend it. Firstly because DigitalOcean blocks port 25 for new users which means you’ll need to use port 465 for SMPT(which is better as well as nobody should use port 25) however you’ll need to configure all the required e-mail policies by yourself required by other mail servers. In such cases, I always recommend people to use a third-party mailing service, there are a lot of free ones.

Hope this helps!