In 2022, DigitalOcean changed its pricing structure. They increased the expenses of their servers a little and introduced a new cloud VPS droplet that costs $4 per month.
This server provides nearly half the resources of the 1GB VPS regular plan.
Today we will put it to the test and see if it’s enough to run your business and maintain a good performance.
About the DigitalOcean $4 Plan:
DigitalOcean is one of the best known cloud hosting companies in the world, and for good reason.
For years it has powered servers for companies, developers and even beginners. Read DigitalOcean review.
With its 2022 price changes, DigitalOcean introduced a new droplet plan that costs $4 a month, and it’s still the cheapest Droplet on the pricing page today.
The $4 server plan comes with 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU processor, 500 GB Transfer bandwidth, and 10 GB SSD storage space.
This plan is only available with the Regular CPU option. When it launched, DigitalOcean listed it in New York (NYC1), Frankfurt (FRA1), San Francisco (SFO3), Singapore (SGP1) and Amsterdam (AMS3). Region availability can change, so check the region picker when you create the droplet.
Also, you don’t have the option to install Apps from DigitalOcean’s marketplace automatically.
We can tell from the surface that this server size is quite enough for new to small websites. But let’s not fully judge before testing it.
Pros and Cons of DigitalOcean $4 Plan:
The Pros:
- Low price: With this droplet, you get an entire VPS server with all the resources you need to launch your web application at a low price.
- SSD storage: This plan offers SSD storage space which will make the app you host fast.
- Generous Bandwidth: You get a 500GB transfer, which is more than what you want for your small website.
The Cons:
- Not available on all data centers: At launch, the $4 plan was offered only in NYC1, FRA1, SFO3, SGP1 and AMS3, not in every DigitalOcean region.
- No automated WordPress installation: This plan doesn’t offer 1-click WordPress installation or any type of app. You would need to do this manually.
How to Install DigitalOcean $4 Droplet?
Installing a server with the $4/month plan is pretty much the same process you would take to install any other VPS server.
Our step-by-step guide to installing WordPress on DigitalOcean covers it in detail, but to sum it up, here’s how you can create a server on the DigitalOcean $4 plan.
For that, you would go to digitalocean.com and sign up or login to your account. If it’s your first time with DigitalOcean, check the sign-up page for a new-user promo credit. The amount changes from time to time, so we don’t quote a number here.
Go to Droplets, and then click Create Droplet.
After that, choose your server operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian.
Next, from the Shared CPU plans choose the Regular with SSD option and then select the $4/mo plan.
Once you do that you can then proceed to the next step of launching your server which is choosing the server data center.
You have to choose one of the data centers where the $4 plan is offered. If the $4 option is greyed out, switch to another region (at launch it was NYC1, FRA1, SFO3, SGP1 and AMS3).
Add the server root passwords, backups, and so on. Each of these settings is explained in our DigitalOcean droplet setup guide.
Can You Install WordPress on the DigitalOcean $4 Server?
Unfortunately, in our tests you couldn’t use the 1-click WordPress app from the DigitalOcean Marketplace on this plan.
When you try to do that, it tells you that “This size doesn’t have enough disk space to support the image you selected”.
Instead, you can set up WordPress manually: pick the Ubuntu image and configure the server yourself.
You can do that easily by following this guide. If you want a short and fast version, follow the commands below.
How to Install WordPress on the DigitalOcean $4 Plan?
There are many ways to set up WordPress manually. In this example, we will use Ubuntu on top of the server. Follow these steps in order.
- First: Access the server:
Access the server via SSH terminal such as Putty and via SFTP client such as Filezilla. We will need them both.
To access the server using these programs you only need the IP address, the username “root” by default, and the root password that you created while creating the server.
- Second: Install PHP and Apache:
On your SSH window, after you log in to your server, enter the command below and click enter to install PHP and Apache.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2 \
ghostscript \
libapache2-mod-php \
mysql-server \
php \
php-bcmath \
php-curl \
php-imagick \
php-intl \
php-json \
php-mbstring \
php-mysql \
php-xml \
php-zip- Third: Install WordPress:
After the above command finishes installing, enter the below command and click enter to create the WordPress installation directory and download the WordPress files from WordPress.org.
sudo mkdir -p /srv/www
sudo chown www-data: /srv/www
curl https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz | sudo -u www-data tar zx -C /srv/www- Fourth: Create a conf file:
This time we will use the SFTP client. After you log in to your server, go to the directory “/etc/apache2/sites-available/” to create the config file for WordPress.
Create a new file there named wordpress.conf (the name matters, because the next step enables it with “a2ensite wordpress”). Paste the lines below into it and save.
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/wordpress
<Directory /srv/www/wordpress>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit Options FileInfo
DirectoryIndex index.php
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory /srv/www/wordpress/wp-content>
Options FollowSymLinks
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>- Fifth: Configure Apache:
Go back to the SSH terminal and enter the following commands one at a time.
sudo a2ensite wordpress
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2dissite 000-default
sudo service apache2 reload
- Sixth: Create WordPress Database and Username:
Now WordPress has been installed successfully. And if you go to your server IP or domain name, you will see that WordPress is installed and ready to be configured before using it.
But to configure it, you need to create a database and a database user first. Open the MySQL prompt with the command below.
sudo mysql -u rootThen create your database, user, and password (replace <your-password> with a strong password).
mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> CREATE USER wordpress@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password>';
mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP,ALTER ON wordpress.* TO wordpress@localhost;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit
- Seventh: Configure WordPress:
Go to your website via your IP address or your domain name if you pointed to your IP address. Choose the language of your WordPress website and click Continue.
Enter the info that you created earlier, your Database name, your Username, your Password, and localhost for your Database host.
Once you do that, click Submit, and now your WordPress website is configured and ready.
DigitalOcean $4/mo Server: Is It Enough?
After testing this plan, we found that it’s as good as the 1GB RAM plan. It contains all resources you need in order to deploy a server.
We also installed WordPress manually on it, and in our earlier tests the site ran smoothly with no issues. Just keep in mind that 512 MB of RAM is tight when Apache, PHP and MySQL share it, so it suits small sites with modest traffic.
In the end, the server is a good start if you are on a budget and you can do manual installation. And you can scale up later on.
Otherwise, DigitalOcean has other affordable plans with more room, such as the $6/month Regular plan with 1 GB of RAM or the $7/month Premium AMD plan. See our full DigitalOcean pricing breakdown to compare them.
Read also:
DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Linode.
Vultr $2.50 Plans Vs. $3.50 Plan Vs. DigitalOcean $4 Plan Comparison.
