I’d like to install n8n on Digital Ocean, but how do I calculate the costs?
I mean: if I have a task that runs 4 times a week (at a specific date and time because it’s automated) and I leave it activated, does it costs only for the seconds that take for the task to run (it would be few seconds each week), or does it cost as a full week?
How about tasks that run on a specific event, so that they periodically check for the event?
It’s only an example: I’m still evaluating if the cost of such solution is good for my needs.
That is probably more a question to ask on the Digital Ocean forum but OK. Digital Ocean charges for the time the Droplet is running. So if you have it running the whole month, they will charge you $4 a month.
The only way to reduce that even further is if would always log into Digital Ocean shortly after the task did run, do a backup, then turn the droplet off, then log in again shortly before it runs, create a new Droplet from the previous backup, wait till the execution finished and you start again from the beginning, then you would just be charged for the minutes between droplet creation and destruction. But honestly, it is $4 a month (with twice the memory, $6) so not sure I understand the question.
Generally, is self-hosting n8n only a good idea if you have experience with setting up servers, Docker, and more. If not the cloud version is probably a better fit.