Question
Using DigitalOcean for a hosting company or SaaS business
I was wondering if it is possible to start a web hosting company or SaaS business with Digital Ocean. I have been building a PHP web application (using the Laravel Framework) for a while now, and it is already done and finished. I had a few clients purchase a copy of this app, but they had to manually set up the app on their own web hosting. This created lots of problems because not all web hosts are created the same. So I then thought that this would be a good opportunity to get into the SaaS business using this web application. I already have a website that handles basic SaaS principles (subscriptions, billing, user accounts, etc). But this is where I hit a roadblock because I didn’t know where to progress from there. This is how I envision the process.
Option 1:
A user purchases a subscription on my website. After the payment has been confirmed a Ubuntu 18.04 droplet will automatically be created on my account and install LAMP, phpMyAdmin, cPanel, as well as the web application that I created.
Option 2:
After the user purchases a subscription, and the payment has been confirmed. A VM will automatically be created for that customer with the web application I created automatically installed, which will be on a droplet that already has the requirements needed. I heard this can cut down on server costs significantly because having several droplets is not very cost-efficient.
Option 3:
Use Docker, which I don’t really understand as much as I do the other options (open to feedback).
Out of all of these options I am leaning towards Options 1 & 2 because I can understand them a little better.
A couple of questions:
Can I use the DigitalOcean API to fulfill these requests? If so, can you point me in the right direction?
Or as a last resort, should I hire a SysAdmin (related) developer to help me with this?
I was reading other posts covering the same topic, but they did not help me very much. Here they are anyway.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/advice-needed-on-how-to-setup-a-saas-service-for-a-php-based-application
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-do-i-set-up-a-saas-product
If have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I will try to provide as much information needed
Thank you in advance for your help!
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