DigitalOcean $4/mo Droplet Plan: Is It Enough For Your Web Application?

On July 1, 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. And today we will put it to the test and see if it’s enough to run your business and maintain its performance.

About the DigitalOcean $4 Droplet Plan:

DigitalOcean is one of the best leading cloud hosting companies in the entire world with a reputation that surpasses it. It has been the server power for a lot of companies and developers, and even beginners and for a long time. Read DigitalOcean review.

After the recent price changes in its servers, DigitalOcean introduced a new droplet plan that costs $4 a month with all the resources and server needs.

The $4 server plan comes with 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU processor, 500 GB Transfer bandwidth, and 10 GB SSD storage space. And it’s only available in the Regular CPU Option.

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.

DigitalOcean Old and New Prices:

DigitalOcean has increased its pricing plans by approximately 20%, it ranges around this number. The Regular VPS that was cost $5, now it costs $6 per month. And the premium that was cost $12, now it costs $14 a month.

Here’s a table of the old and new of some of the VPS DigitalOcena servers:

Plan	Old Monthly Price	New Monthly Price
1GB Regular	$5.00	$6.00
2GB Regular	$10.00	$12.00
1GB Premium	$6.00	$7.00
2GB Premium	$12.00	$14.00
4GB Premium	4GB Premium	4GB Premium
16GB Premium	$96.00	$112.00

How to Install the DigitalOcean $4 Droplet?

Installing a server on the $4/month plan is pretty much the same process you would take to install any other VPS server. You can read this article to do that in detail. But here’s how you can install a server on the DigitalPcean $4 plan.

For that, you would go to digitalocean.com and then login to your account. 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 steps of launching your server which are choosing the server data center, adding the server root passwords, backups, and so on. To know how to do that in detail you can read this article.

You can also use our affiliate link to get a $100 free credit for new DigitalOcean users.

Can You Install WordPress on the DigitalOcean $4 Server?

Unfortunately, you can not install the 1-click WordPress install from the DigitalOcean marketplace. When you try to do that, it tells you that “This size doesn’t have enough disk space to support the image you selected”.

We didn’t give up, we decided that we will do a manual setup for WordPress, we used the Ubuntu image and did configure the server. You can do that easily by following this guide. But if you want a brief and fast guide you follow the commands below.

How to Install WordPress on the DigitalOcean $4 Plan?

On the 500MB RAM DigitalOcean plan you can’t set up WordPress from their marketplace, you have to make it manually.

There are many ways to setup 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 login to your server go to the directory “/etc/apache2/sites-available/” to create the config file for WordPress.

Go to the directory and create a new file. Open the new file and copy the lines below and then save it.

<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 command each 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 in order to configure it, you need to create a database and a username. To do so go to the MySQL directory following the command below

sudo mysql -u root

And then you can create your database, username, and password

mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> CREATE USER [email protected] IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password>';
mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP,ALTER
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.

PROS and CONS of DigitalOcean $4 Droplet:

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. So you can deploy and run a server without having to spend much.
SSD storage: Yes the price of this plan is low, but that doesn’t mean that you will get a bad server that doesn’t perform well. In fact, you get the same CPUs and SSD storage the Rgeylar plan has.
Generous Bandwidth: Even though this plan is the cheapest DigitlaOcean product, you get a 500GB transfer, which is more than what you want for your small website.

The CONs:

Just on the Regular droplets: The $4 plan is only available in the basic Regular droplets. You won’t find it anywhere in the premium VPS plans.
Not for medium to big sites: There’s no doubt this server will work just fine for new and small websites. But if your website gets a lot of visitors every month, then you will have to scale up your server for bigger plans.

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. But, with fewer resources.

Also, we installed WordPress manually on it, the WordPress website runs smoothly with no any issue.

In the end, the server is a good start if you are on a budget, and you can scale up later on. So if you can’t afford the $6 or the $7 every month, we recommend it for you.