After searching the internet for hours and attempting to setup my production server only to corrupt /etc/passwd and needing to start over, I have decided to document what I do in case I need to do it all again. From my findings, I see a ton of blog posts telling how to do one thing I need, and most are either way out dated or don’t consider modern day security practices. Here’s my take.
Goal: Release my NodeJS app onto the internet (for as little money as possible)
The only paid services I’ll be using is Digital Ocean and Namecheap. I could host using Heroku, and use a MongoDB service, and some logging service, and some whatever service for whatever else. But then I’d be spending $100/mo on all those $5-10/mo services just to have a production ready app. For this app, I’ll be going with a single Digitial Ocean droplet for $0.007/hr aka $5/mo and pay ~$11.00 for my a year of my domain.