Servers

[Tiberius]

Yeah, I get it.  The cheapest option I could find was:
0.75 GB RAM / 1 core / 32GB hard drive with Linux installed = $14.68 / month.  Adding an extra core and 8BG ram will put that price up really fast though.  I'm curious though. . . do you know what a "core" means?  Does it depend on the base hardware, or is it a standard # of Teraflops, or what?

"Core" is apparently the new standard for selling CPUs, and it's pretty dumb. It just hides information from the user, there's no standard speed each core should be. You can use some comparison sites though, for instance: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_azure

If you scroll down to the "Sysbench CPU Performances" and compare the Azure B1MS plan to the Digital Ocean Standard 2GB 1 core plan (both have 1 core) you'll see that the Azure instance CPU is about 1.44 times faster than the Digital Ocean instance CPU in terms of ops per second. Advantage Azure in that respect, however that still doesn't justify the cost.

I actually opted for a 2-core 8GB system, and I have to say it's performing like a real champ: very nice and quick page loads handling a couple hundred customers who use the site daily for an hour or two.  I'm also curious-- is your $40 / month billed by hour?  Do you have any commitments other than paying for what you use each month?  I ask because I may put up a sister site on a US server some day.

Yup, everything on Digital Ocean is billed per hour, as far as I am aware. No other commitments, what you see is what you get. I also pay for weekly backups which is billed at 20% of the monthly cost (so for my $40 / month server, I pay an extra $8 / month for 4 backups).

IIRC, the "temporary" storage is true temp storage. . . used only for page caching etc., but not to be expected to maintain state reliably, especially if you restart the server/site.

I use CloudFlare for page caching, which is free.

Also, I like Windows.  So, there's that.

*vomits*