Getting Started with Hosting Websites on DigitalOcean

There are different ways to host a website on DigitalOcean depending on your goals. You can choose to have full control of your infrastructure or to let us manage the infrastructure on your behalf for ease of deployment.

For ease of deployment, use App Platform, which is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that lets us take on the burden of infrastructure management for you. You upload your app or static site to GitHub and we handle the dependencies and deploy it to the cloud.

Build and deploy apps on push in the cloud with App Platform.

App Platform automatically creates a subdomain for your app on ondigitalocean.app, but you can set up a custom domain as well.

Add a custom domain to use for your app, in addition to its included ondigitalocean.com subdomain.

Store data by integrating with DigitalOcean Managed Databases directly from the control panel.

Create managed relational databases from directly within App Platform for use in development or production applications.

For full control of your infrastructure, use Droplets, which are virtual machines that come in a variety of plans so you can choose the vCPU, RAM, and storage resources you need. For full control with faster setup time, create a Droplet using one of our Marketplace’s 1-Click images which have software already installed and configured for common setups.

Create a new Droplet with our recommended configuration for improved security, reliability, and monitoring.
Create a Droplet with Apache, MySQL, and PHP already installed and configured for you.
marketplace.digitalocean.com

Once you create a server, use DigitalOcean’s DNS management to manage your domains and DNS records from your DigitalOcean account at no extra cost.

Add a domain to your DigitalOcean account to manage its DNS records from the control panel and API.
Create and configure DNS records for domains managed on DigitalOcean.

To scale up, use DigitalOcean Load Balancers for a highly-available load balancing service that supports encrypted web traffic.

Create a load balancer and choose its backend Droplets to improve the availability and flexibility of your infrastructure.
Set up SSL passthrough to send encrypted SSL requests directly to the backend Droplet pool via the VPC network. This secures the traffic between the load balancers and the backend Droplets.

Alternatively, you can manually implement your own high availability infrastructure with Reserved IPs and a failover mechanism.

Animated active/passive diagram
Create a reserved IP and assign it to a Droplet to use it as an additional publicly-accessible IP address.
A tutorial from the DigitalOcean community on creating an HA setup using Heartbeat, open-source cluster infrastructure software, and DigitalOcean Reserved IPs.
digitalocean.com/community

To store and serve web assets, such as images, logs, or HTML files, use Spaces, which is an S3-compatible object storage with a built-in CDN so you can reuse existing tools and code.

Create a Spaces bucket to store and serve large amounts of data. Create multiple Spaces buckets at no additional cost to use as logical units for segmenting content.