Is it Premature for Me to Think in Terms of Hosting my "Toy" Webserver?

Hi there @shakervc,

This is a great question!

I don’t think that this is a premature decision at all. In my opinion, it is going to be a great learning experience to deploy a Droplet, install the necessary and upload your website/project and also it is quite fun and sometimes challenging if you do it for the first time.

I will try to answer all of your questions:

• Is there a free trial period? - Yes, you can sing up via this link here $100 free credit to deploy any Droplets/Servers that you would like

• If not, am I committing myself to a certain period of time? - There are no commitments, you can delete your server at any time and you will no longer be billed for it. You are also going to be charged per the hour so you can deploy/create a server, run some tests and delete the server after that, and you would be charged only for the time that the server was up, for example, if you go for the smallest $5 Droplet, it would cost you $0.007 per hour.

• Can I move my project to a droplet without going through git/Github? - Yes you can use SFTP to upload your project to the Droplet directly without having to upload it to GitHub first.

• What exactly do I get in my droplet? Can I get Windows 10 so that I can start my server there (just I do it locally)? - While creating a Droplet, you can choose the operating system, currently, you can choose between various Linux and Unix distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD and a lot more.

I could recommend starting with Ubuntu as it is really well supported and a bit easier. There are also great tutorials on the DigitalOcean website on how to install NodeJS and Express on Ubuntu that you could follow:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-express-a-node-js-framework-and-set-up-socket-io-on-a-vps

• Will I get an IP address for accessing my server? - Yes, each server comes with 1 dedicated IPv4 IP address

• Is this all premature? Should I wait till my server is better fleshed out? - I think that it is going to be nice to gain some experience with setting up your own servers, that way you would feel more comfortable with it by the time your project is ready

• Installing WordPress on the same Droplet as your main project would not be a problem at all, you can use Nginx as a reverse proxy to serve multiple sites or projects from the same Droplet.

On another note, you are not able to access your project from your phone probably because of a few things:

• Your Phone needs to be connected to the same network
• You need to open port 3000 via your Windows Firewall for incoming TCP connections

If you want to access your project from the outside world, what you need to do is set up Port Forwarding via your home router, so that the traffic is forwarded from your public IP to your local network accordingly. However, if you decide to go with creating your Droplet instead, making those changes to your router would not be needed.

Hope that this helps! Good luck with your project and keep us posted with the progress! Regards, Bobby