Alternative to Amazon AWS

As some of you may know I have been using Amazon AWS for a while. At first it was to use the Glacier file storage service to provide secure offsite backups for myself and clients business data. After attending a Synology seminar I got a 2 bay NAS for cost, so my old 1 bay is now used as a backup target for those businesses.

Then I got into the whole world of a cloud based controller for my customer premises WiFi hardware – Ubiquiti UniFi. So I set up a virtual Ubuntu server which has been working just fine and I can’t really complain at the cost – average $16 a month. However the billing can be quite complex, based on CPU usage and traffic as well as the level of virtual hardware. The management console isn’t the easiest to understand and uses Amazon speak all over the place. I can do what I need to but needed help at first.

Ubiquiti has just brought out a Beta for their UNMS service which does the same management function for infrastructure WiFi kit – AirMax and “Edge” switches. It will monitor traffic on all ports of the devices and you can set up data links for it to monitor on a topology view too. You can also remotely deploy firmware updates but you can’t change any of the device configurations (yet).

So I thought about setting up a second AWS server, but you only get 1 free public IP address on your AWS account. Then I discovered tutorials for setting up UNMS using Digital Ocean as the provider. Setting up a machine with DO (called droplets) is far easier and each gets their own public IP address. There is also a web console for each droplet as well as using SSH and a public IP should make getting a security certificate easier.

My UniFi U16.04 1 CPU/1GB/25GB SSD/1TB data server is $5 a month and the UNMS 1 CPU/2 GB/50GB SSD/1TB is $10. So I should get 2 for the price of 1. You can easily add block storage to your account and allocate it to droplets like it’s a local drive.

Set up is trivially easy and takes 2 minutes for the machine to go live with a vanilla U16.04 server with SSH installed, you get emailed the IP and root password (enforced change on first login). Before setting up the droplet I went into my DYN DNS account and allocated a domain name which I used as the droplets name, then allocated the IP address once the droplet was live. This then let me use Let’s Encrypt to get a free security certificate for each machine allowing secure https access (UNMS integrates the process). I’ve been trying to crack that for ages! If you let Digital Ocean look after your DNS records, their integration with Let’s Encrypt means it’s just as easy to get a certificate for any machine.

As I used a referral I have $100 credit (to use in 60 days) so plenty of time to see how it works out. I have transferred the bulk of my UniFi sites to the DO server to see how the traffic side of things go and compare costs. But from a management point of view DO is far simpler to understand than AWS because it is a far simpler product, but just what I need. However you can set up a node,js, docker or PHP stack droplet with the touch of a button and there is a Load Balancer to distribute traffic between multiple Droplets for the big boy stuff.

If you fancy trying it here’s my referral link https://m.do.co/c/eca4a1399e8f