Should I use droplets, volumes or spaces?

anyone have another answer?

We use two Droplets, one for the web server running Laravel, one for the MySQL database. The web server is with 8GB RAM and 160GB storage and that works out fine for our web application and customer data.

The database can be done managed with Digital Ocean, but we decided to manage it ourselves using a Droplet as well. We have a 2GB 60GB Droplet. With the server in your own network with only access to it by the web server that works just fine.

We did try Spaces to store our customer static data as images, videos, and CSS. we however ran into rate limiting issues. Partly because there were issues with backups and cached data being removed, but also because DO’s rate limiting is … really limiting and to read, write, edit image data you tend to need a lot of requests or a more complicated caching in between to avoid too many requests, which is hard to accomplish.

We do now use Spaces for backups still and that work well after some tweaking, but we dropped using it for media management for now. Too many issues and too little support. Frankly feels like Spaces is not getting much priority with Digital Ocean.

If we do need more storage for our customers in the future we may use another Object Storage provider like Wasabi or simply add a volume to the main web server. The latter won’t run into rate limiting issues as it is just an additional hard disk and it works pretty well too.