Postgres deployment is divided into two options:
- Managed - the infrastructure provider manages the instances for you including data backups and failover in the event of a crash/corruption.
- Unmanaged - we the engineers or operations team need to manage it including data integrity and availability.
Both have their place. But if you are not an experienced Database Administrator (DBA) or System Administrator (SysAdmin), you should seriously consider a managed service. The risk of data loss greatly outweighs the cost of a managed service.
With that in mind we have prepared a quick guide
to deploying managed Postgres on DigitalOcean:
/managed-postgres-digitalocean.md
If you are still feeling adventurous,
or curious to see how the unmanaged setup works,
see:
/postgres/self-managed-vps.md
There are many other options for "cloud" providers
for managed Postgres and other SQL databases.
We looked at all the major ones including
AWS, GCP, Azure.
Sadly, AWS Aurara while appealing,
has deliberately confusing pricing:
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing
They have costs for I/O requests, storage,
backtrack (backup) and data transfer.
By contrast DigitalOcean has transparent
pricing based on the VPS (Memory, CPU and SSD) used.