What is DigitalOcean's Spaces Cloud Storage?
DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. As of December 2015, DigitalOcean was the second largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.
DigitalOcean's Spaces Cloud Storage is extremely useful for any WordPress owners to combine it with their WordPress Cloud Backup process. You can store each of your recurrent WordPress files backup and each of WordPress DB backup archives in your own cloud, inside your DigitalOcean Spaces account.
Why use DigitalOcean?
Transparent and predictable pricing: "At DigitalOcean, we're on a mission to simplify the complexities of infrastructure and that includes pricing." Spaces is a scalable and simple object storage to store, serve, backup, and archive any amount of web content, images, media and static files for your web applications.
Safe, Secure, and Tailored Backups: Automated solutions, stored in your own Spaces Cloud Storage.
Spaces Cloud Storage Price
Pricing starts at $5 per month and includes 250 GB of storage, 1 TB of outbound transfer, $0.02 per additional GB stored, $0.01 per additional GB transferred. Attach additional SSD-based Block Storage volumes to your Droplet to suit your database, file storage, application, service, mobile, and backup needs. Pricing starts at $0.10/GB per month.
Cost Estimation Calculator
Since, the price per GBof storage, it is very easy to understand the advantage. Let's take "big WordPress customer" and do an estimative calculation. Assume a database big enough to have a 1GB archive file PLUS 100 GB of files under the hood, inside WordPress. Hourly DB backups and daily full backup is an extreme approach, but let's crunch the numbers. Database: 1GB X 24 hours X 31 days = 744 GB/month. Files: 100GB X 31 days = 3100 GB/month. Both would be 3844 GB/month. This means,that we need the 1 TB Pre-Paid Plan for $62 per month.
Now, let's consider, that we don't need ALL the existing backups, just the last 7 from each (database and files). This means we need to delete existing archive files when we have old unwanted ones. Database: keep only last seven backups for each last 7 days (not the last 7 from last day), and delete the rest. Crunching the numbers for database: 744 GB/month - last 7GB = 737 GB/month. Same logic for files: 3100 GB/month - 700 GB = 2400 GB/month. Both would be 3137 GB/month. Price reduction from $62 (initial storage space cos) would be - $14.14, for 1 Month for Cloud Storage space.
Now, let's consider, that somebody will crash the hosting server and erase everything, weekly. Then, you need to restore everything, weekly. If this happens to you, then consider switching immediately to owl power, as this is a borderline crazy scenario! Restoring would mean to download 5 times in a month a single database archive and a single file archive; always the last one, right before the server crash. Crunching the numbers for database: 1GB X 5 times = 5 GB/month PLUS for the files: 100 GB X 5 times = 500 GB/month would add up to a 505 GB extra Download cost. The needed 505GB is half of the included 1 TB of outbound transfer, so, this would not generate an extra cost.
Total Cost for 1 Month is $14.14, at the end of this scenario. Still pretty decent, right?
Secure Data Storage: Managed Restore process, exactly when you need it!
