Mimimum Requirements When Deploying to Digital Ocean

I have created a single page app using Meteor to help me learn about full-stack development. The app will send emails via a contact form and integrate the stripe library to sell one item. I have no need for accounts or the db as it happens.

Part of me thinks that I have actually gone a bit overkill and the simple solution would have been to create it using Node instead. However I don’t want to backtrack just yet because I only began to err when it came to price of deployment.

I followed a tutorial where the tutor created an e-commerce site using Meteor and deployed it on Digital Ocean. The tutor recommends creating it using a droplet with 2GB RAM. This is the $20 dollar a month option.

I want to begin with the cheapest option I can get away with but not so cheap as it wont run. Would this work adequately on the lowest option (512MB RAM)? What are peoples experiences? More importantly how does one decide which pricing options to go with when presented with a choice?
Please advise.

I’ve been using the cheapest (5$) hosting on DO for a project.
So far it’s been working fine, but mind you this has been simply for testing, with a max of 3-4 people on it at once.
This coming week I’m going to test it with 20-30 people using the website, and will be using Kadira to view the performance.

But yeah, it does work fine with the 5$ option!
Easy to scale upwards after that as well.

I’ve got 6 meteor apps running on one $5 dollar droplet. Only 1 is a productive system with 2 regular users. Runs like a champ for what I use it for.

Edit: on a $5 droplet you don’t get much ram. You’ll want to configure a swap file I think. I’m not a sys admin type but the top of this article explains how I think: http://www.erikaheidi.com/blog/setting-optimized-droplet-ubuntu-nginx-php5-fpm

@patrickbolle @peter.roehlen

Thank your for the responses. I think I have some reading to do regarding the topic of deployment. Last night I learnt a few things; for example I discovered that it is possible to host multiple domains on the same NGinX server & within the same droplet. A comment from a user said that he had a big fat droplet and normally assigned 1GB RAM to each app.

I think it it would be useful to newbies to see a meteor guide article on the sort of metrics you need to monitor so you can can take a data driven approach to deciding on how much resource you need to pay for no matter what the cloud hosting provider. It would be a way to learn about what’s important before you jump to a paid service such as Kadira.