How I saved $800 a year moving from DigitalOcean to Oracle Free Tier

Migrating from DigitalOcean to Oracle


Use case

My use-case was relatively simple. We needed an application to track supply chain demands over time. The reason was that the company I was working with were still using hand-written notes and sending these notes to vendors who would then transcribe it and send assets over. All of this took a lot of overhead and time; furthermore, it was very easy to forget what kind of assets were already purchased since there was no searchable history.

The tech stack built to approach this problem was a front-end built in react and hosted statically. The backend was a simple Django application, simply wrapping around my DB and simply hosting the API / backend. This was the only thing I needed to host and honestly it could be a completely serverless application, but I didn't want to muck around too much with serverless as this project had a timeline of a week.

Digital Ocean

Digital ocean, as you may already know, is a cloud hosting provider for developers who want to quickly host their own website / application without having to go through the hassle of setting up networking and manually allocating resources on cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

I was one of those lazy developers too! The ease of use of digital ocean is unparalleled, I didn't have to worry about anything going wrong during my deployment process and it was mostly hassle free. The only downside is that the bill is crazy expensive! 

This is my bill only for a simple VM with a few gigs of ram :|

Keep in mind, all this does is host the backend which is accessed roughly twice a day! After hearing about Oracle's always-free cloud VMs, I decided to bite the bullet and transition over. 

Moving over to Oracle cloud

Luckily for me, I already had all my scripts for deployment set up from my previous digitalOcean deployment. So it was as simple as copying my repo over. A few hiccups because Oracle by default all ingress traffic except for SSH, so I had to configure some firewall rules within the VM in addition to the network rules on Oracle as well.

All said and done, I spun down my DigitalOcean VM



and am now running on Oracle for free instead!


Now obviously, I glossed over a bunch of things such as the migration efforts and the devops invovled with hosted zones / networking. But there are many tutorials covering those so I won't bore you with those details :)


That's all! Now according to math, I should have an extra $800 to spend! /s

Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada

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