I am developing a side project on Laravel. I want to deploy to digital ocean or aws but I don't understand a lot of those services. Can help me learn more about prices and management those services?
You have to buy Virtual Machines from DigitalOcean or AWS inorder to host your laravel app. In DigitalOcean VMs are called 'Droplets' and 'EC2 instance' in AWS. The pricing of DO droplets starts from $5 per month (1GB ram, 25GB ssd). For a Laravel app without huge traffic that should be enough. If the traffic increases you can upgrade in future. digitalocean.com/pricing
Aws also have similar plans. But they're generally 30-40% costlier than DigitalOcean. See aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand
AWS have free tier for limited usage (maybe if you need it just for testing), Other then that if we are talking about production site then AWS costs you for what you use. You will need to understand how much CPU power, ram, storage space you need. AWS have different options for storage as well. At the end it will cost you for what you use, and amazon will ask you to add credit card in your account for billing incase you go beyond the free plan they will start adding expenses to your account and at the end of month they will charge you for what you have used such as up-time of server instance selected (price varies for types of instances), storage space used , bandwidth for outgoing and incoming. AWS does not provide an ticket support for it's basic support system, you will need to purchase an premium support from them if you need any technical help from them. If you know what you are doing with server then you are good to go (watch out the prices), you can calculate the monthly price you are going to pay from this calculator by amazon calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html, it will give you an estimation of what you will be paying for the services you use with AWS.
Digital Ocean do have different types of servers with cheap priced servers as well , which starts from $5 a month from the cheapest one (hashnode is hosted on digital ocean) and price goes up as per your need for type of server you need. Digital ocean provides very clear information regarding Pricing and type of servers based on price which you can see right here: digitalocean.com/pricing .
All of the above are self managed servers, so you need to know how to work with servers (centos, ubuntu, debian).
Not all Laravel apps are the same. Maybe you can compare pricing pages and see how much they charge and what they charge for. 🙂
Ryosuke
Designer / Developer / Influencer
I've been able to host a Laravel app on the free tier of AWS for a year now and hasn't cost a dime (beyond other AWS fees like Route53 domain management).
Where I push the limits quickly is:
I'd recommend hosting your app on there for a month or so, get some average usage statistics, and apply those values to their pricing calculator
In terms of DigitalOcean, they only charge by the storage space and bandwidth use. So it's easier to run an Laravel app on there without incurring "micro-charges". If your app reaches some sort of performance limitation, the DO server will just crash (or you can automatically scale it up, depending on your setup). However, you don't get the benefit of dedicated services like AWS' RDS, so you'd have to spin up your own SQL server (either in the same droplet, or preferably another).