I am very confused...
I found this and see it's for website hosting it looks like? But what's a droplet?
Is this for developers mainly or can I just use it to host a new Wordpress site? I don't understand this place..
Is the $5/mo per month or am I going to have to pay that x12 in advance?
Hi @KJayy
DigitalOcean is a hosting provider.
They offer, among other, droplets which is their name for a Virtual Private Server (VPS).
You can do whatever you'd like on the VPS, since you're almost in full control. It's like having your own server, but you don't need to maintain the hardware.
It started out mainly as a place for developers, but now major websites and systems are being hosted on DigitalOcean.
You could use it for hosting WordPress, but if you have no server administration experience, then I would highly recommend that you find another hosting company that offers "shared hosting", so they take care of the server and you just take care of your WordPress.
On DigitalOcean you actually only pay per hour, and pay-after-use, but it's difficult to setup Nginx, PHP7.1, MariaDB and WordPress on a $5 droplet without running out of RAM, which leads to crashes.
Hi
The droplet is same as Cloud VPS. You can choose Operating System or One-click apps.
DigitalOcean supports those operating systems: Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, CoreOS, CentOS.
DigitalOcean supports those one-click apps: [http://prntscr.com/epytb6](http://)
For the plans, you can choose one of these: [http://prntscr.com/epyts1](http://)
For more open account, and see the benefits of DigitalOcean
A Droplet, in short, is a VPS, or Virtual Private Server.
A VPS is similar to a Dedicated Server -- you're given root access and you're able to configure the server to your liking.
Unlike Shared Hosting, however, you're responsible for your VPS and that means you're responsible for updating and upgrading software, maintaining security, installing your stack, installing WordPress and other sysadmin duties.
With Shared Hosting, you receive an account and the web hosting provider handles the rest of the general day-to-day tasks (such as those I mentioned above) in the background so you don't have to worry about it.
Additionally, unlike Shared Hosting, unless you install one of your own, a VPS does not provide you with a Control Panel (like cPanel or Plesk). Without a Control Panel, most of your time will be spent using the CLI (Command Line Interface) using Terminal (MacOS), PuTTy (Windows), or a similar type of shell (if you're running a Linux distro for your desktop).