The Best Way to Host MongoDB® on DigitalOcean

MongoDB® is the #3 open-source database and the #1 NoSQL database worldwide. It’s a cross-platform document-oriented database that uses JSON-like documents with schema and is leveraged broadly across startup apps and enterprise-level businesses developing modern apps.

While you may assume that most of the cloud database deployments are run on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, small to medium-sized businesses, particularly, are gravitating towards the developer-friendly cloud provider, DigitalOcean, for their hosting for MongoDB® needs. DigitalOcean helps developers by providing a simplified cloud computing environment that enables them to focus on building and scaling applications efficiently.

In this post, we’ll explain how to host MongoDB® on DigitalOcean, including the best instance types, disk types, replication strategy, and managed service providers.

Introduction to Cloud Computing for MongoDB

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses approach data storage and management. With the rise of cloud-based services, companies can now easily scale their infrastructure to meet growing demands without the need for expensive hardware upgrades. For MongoDB users, cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including increased scalability, flexibility, and cost savings.

Cloud computing is a model of delivering computing services over the internet, where resources such as servers, storage, and applications are provided as a service to users on-demand. This allows businesses to quickly scale up or down to meet changing demands, without the need for expensive hardware upgrades. Cloud computing also provides a range of benefits, including increased flexibility, scalability, and cost savings.

For MongoDB users, cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including:

• Scalability: Cloud computing allows businesses to quickly scale up or down to meet changing demands, without the need for expensive hardware upgrades.
• Flexibility: Cloud computing provides a range of deployment options, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, allowing businesses to choose the best option for their needs.
• Cost savings: Cloud computing eliminates the need for expensive hardware upgrades, reducing costs and improving ROI.

By leveraging cloud computing, businesses can ensure their MongoDB databases are always ready to handle increased loads and drive business growth.

DigitalOcean Advantages for MongoDB®

So, what makes DigitalOcean a compelling alternative to other popular MongoDB® hosting providers like AWS and Azure? As mentioned above, DigitalOcean is highly developer-friendly with its simple and easy-to-understand platform – you do not need to become certified through this cloud provider to be able to get your deployment up and running with confidence. They offer SSD-based cloud hosting with straightforward pricing as well, starting at just $5/month, which makes it ideal (and affordable) for developers to build, test, and deploy their new applications seamlessly in the cloud.

DigitalOcean’s fully managed offerings simplify infrastructure management for developers and businesses, allowing them to focus on innovation and application development. What’s most impressive is that you’re not compromising performance for cost. We ran performance tests for MongoDB® on DigitalOcean vs. AWS vs. Azure and found that DigitalOcean’s performance was in line with, if not better, on both high throughput and low latency in the deployment. Additionally, DigitalOcean makes it easy to provision highly available MongoDB clusters with scalable options, ensuring high availability and performance.

Find out how to reduce your Database Hosting Costs

DigitalOcean Droplets

DigitalOcean specializes in SSD-based virtual machines called Droplets that are broken down into four simple categories. The most basic Droplet is their Standard instance which uses shared CPU starting at just $5/month. While adequate for low-traffic applications, small databases, and dev/test environments, we recommend leveraging shared clusters for your MongoDB production deployments. They also offer a dedicated CPU-Optimized Droplet, which is sufficient for CPU-intensive workloads but offers low memory, which is not ideal for MongoDB® hosting.

If you are deploying a medium-sized MongoDB® workload, we would recommend their most popular General Purpose Droplet which is a dedicated instance that offers 4GB of memory for each vCPU. This is typically more than adequate for production deployments and high-traffic applications and starts at $60/month for 8GB of memory, 2 vCPUs, 4TB of transfer, and 25GB of SSD disk space. Additionally, DigitalOcean provides scalable storage options to enhance the flexibility and efficiency of managed database services for MongoDB clusters.

DigitalOcean also recently launched their Memory-Optimized Droplets which are dedicated instances that are designed for RAM-intensive applications and high-performing databases, making it an attractive solution for heavy-workload MongoDB® applications.

You can deploy MongoDB® on DigitalOcean in 12 data center regions across the world, including the United States (New York City and San Francisco), Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany, and India.

 

DigitalOcean Disk Types

One of the reasons MongoDB® performs so well on DigitalOcean is because of its SSD disks, which are ideal for cloud database deployments. They provide great throughput that offers significant benefits for running an index on your database or repairing a machine, saving you a significant amount of time over a standard MongoDB® deployment on AWS. They even offer amazingly low latency from Amazon AWS US-East to the DigitalOcean New York datacenter, which is great for applications that are running their front on mid-tier on AWS but would like to use DigitalOcean for their MongoDB® clusters. Staying informed about the latest MongoDB releases, such as MongoDB 7.0, is crucial to leverage the updates and features provided by DigitalOcean.

MongoDB® Replication Strategies

If you’re running MongoDB® on DigitalOcean in production, it’s best practice to deploy using a replica set to ensure high availability and data redundancy for your clusters. Standby nodes can further enhance database reliability and redundancy by taking over and serving requests in the event of a primary node failure, ensuring continuous service availability and minimizing disruptions for users.

DigitalOcean, along with AWS and Azure, offer a 99.99% uptime SLA, but while that sounds close to perfect, that 0.01% equates to 52.6 minutes of downtime in one year. That’s almost one hour where your database becomes inaccessible to your customers, visitors, and employees which can have a significant impact on your customer retention and brand reputation.

MongoDB® Replica Sets

Fortunately, you can highly mitigate the risk of your deployment going down with a loss of a data center by setting up a geographically distributed 3-node replica set for MongoDB® on DigitalOcean. Managing entire clusters in this way ensures high availability and stability for your MongoDB deployments. There are a couple of options for setting up this configuration, the first being a Primary-Secondary-Arbiter setup which provides 2 data-bearing nodes and an arbiter which acts as a voting member to determine which replica should take over in the event one becomes unavailable.

This is the most affordable option as the arbiter does not hold any data and costs less to deploy but also offers 1 less node that can take over in a failover event. The optimal replication strategy would be a Primary-Secondary-Secondary setup, which leverages 3 data-bearing nodes and allows you to failover to 2 separate datacenter in the event your primary region goes down.

Sharding in Highly Available MongoDB® Clusters

MongoDB® sharding is an advanced form of deployment that allows you to horizontally scale out your data across multiple machines. This is a very complex configuration to set up and manage, as each shard contains multiple replica sets, and can be distributed across different datacenter locations for high availability.

Sharding is ideal for very large data sets or high throughput deployments that require more capacity than you can get with a single server. Where the typical deployment scales vertically by adding more capacity to a server when needed, sharding allows you to scale horizontally by dividing your data and load across multiple machines.

Managed databases provide scalable storage solutions for MongoDB clusters, allowing users to independently adjust their storage capacity without needing to upgrade their entire database plan. Once you have your sharded environment set up, you can add more shards as needed to support your application growth.

At ScaleGrid, we offer Standalone, 2 Replicas + Arbiter, 3 Replicas, and advanced Sharding configurations for hosting MongoDB on DigitalOcean under our Dedicated Hosting plan, starting with a Micro plan size at $18/month up to an X4XLarge plan with 16 cores, 48GB of RAM and 950GB of storage. You can also customize your MongoDB replica set with an unlimited number of replicas for your application needs.

Scaling and Optimizing MongoDB

Scaling and optimizing MongoDB is critical to ensuring that your database can handle growing demands and provide high levels of performance. In this section, we’ll explore how to scale and optimize MongoDB effectively.

To scale MongoDB, follow these steps:

1. Monitor Performance: Continuously monitor the performance of your MongoDB instance to identify any bottlenecks.
2. Add Nodes: Add additional nodes to the cluster to increase capacity and improve performance. This helps in distributing the load and ensuring high availability.
3. Load Balancer: Configure the MongoDB instance to use a load balancer to distribute traffic across multiple nodes, ensuring even load distribution.
4. Sharding and Replication: Use MongoDB’s built-in scaling features, such as sharding and replication, to distribute data across multiple nodes. Sharding helps in handling large datasets by dividing them into smaller, more manageable pieces.

To optimize MongoDB, follow these steps:

1. Identify Bottlenecks: Monitor the performance of your MongoDB instance and identify any bottlenecks that may be affecting performance.
2. Optimize Configuration: Adjust the configuration of the MongoDB instance to improve performance. This may include tuning memory settings, adjusting cache sizes, and optimizing query performance.
3. Indexing and Caching: Use MongoDB’s built-in optimization features, such as indexing and caching, to improve query performance and reduce latency.
4. Third-Party Tools: Utilize third-party tools like MongoDB Compass to optimize and monitor the performance of your MongoDB instance. These tools provide valuable insights and help in fine-tuning your database.

By scaling and optimizing your MongoDB deployment, you can ensure that your database remains performant and can handle increased loads, driving business growth.

Securing Your MongoDB Database

Securing your MongoDB database is critical to protecting your data from unauthorized access and ensuring the integrity of your database. This section will explore how to secure your MongoDB database effectively.

To secure your MongoDB database, follow these steps:

1. Enable Authentication and Authorization: Control access to the database by enabling authentication and authorization. This ensures that only authorized users can access and modify the data.
2. Use Encryption: Protect data in transit and at rest by using encryption. This adds an extra layer of security, making it difficult for unauthorized users to access sensitive information.
3. Secure Connection Protocols: Configure the MongoDB instance to use secure connection protocols, such as SSL/TLS, to ensure that data transmitted between clients and servers is encrypted.
4. Access Control and Auditing: Utilize MongoDB’s built-in security features, such as access control and auditing, to monitor and control access to the database. This helps in tracking any unauthorized access attempts and maintaining a secure environment.
5. Third-Party Security Tools: Consider using third-party tools like MongoDB Enterprise to provide additional security features and support. These tools offer advanced security capabilities, such as role-based access control and comprehensive auditing.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your MongoDB database is secure and protected from unauthorized access, safeguarding your mission-critical infrastructure and driving business growth.

Fully Managed Database Hosting on DigitalOcean

Now we get down to the ultimate question – should you self-manage your MongoDB® on DigitalOcean deployments or leverage a fully managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platform? The answer boils down to your time, knowledge, and all-time accessibility to handle any critical issues that come up with your deployment. A fully managed DBaaS platform offers automatic backups, providing daily backups of your entire clusters at no cost, along with point-in-time recovery for a week.

Management & Maintenance Tasks with Automatic Backups

DBaaS platforms for MongoDB® platforms allow you to automate all of your time-consuming management and maintenance operations like version upgrades, scaling, backups, restores, provisioning, de-provisioning, replication, compacting, index management, OS patching, and log rotations. Depending on the size of your deployment, this may take you 1-2 days per month, up to a full-time army of experts working around the clock.

A huge benefit of leveraging a DBaaS platform is that you eliminate the risk of human error as the management operations are automated for you. It also keeps your MongoDB® clusters on DigitalOcean fully secured and up-to-date so you do not open your deployments up to potential bugs or threats that can present with a neglected database.

Monitoring Performance

Monitoring is also a huge component of managing a MongoDB® deployment. With a DBaaS platform, you can automate alerts on all of your key MongoDB® metrics so you’re informed the moment an undesired threshold is met, and access an advanced monitoring console to analyze all of your MongoDB® and OS metrics across your primary and secondary instances and over any period.

Additionally, with a DBaaS like ScaleGrid, you can leverage the Slow Query Analyzer, which allows you to visualize slow-running queries and optimize them before they start affecting your deployment performance.

Troubleshooting Support

Last but not least is the accessibility to support. If you have been woken up at 4:00 am by a frantic call from your boss wondering why your application is down and how quickly you can get it back up, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Each minute of downtime can cost you thousands of dollars of business, and much worse, a security breach could shut your business down altogether and put an everlasting stain on your reputation.

By leveraging a DBaaS platform and its different support packages, you can get ahead of over 90% of these critical issues and have a team of experts at your side 24/7 for the unavoidable 10% to help you quickly identify and resolve the problems to get your deployment back to a healthy, running state.

At ScaleGrid, we identified DigitalOcean as an up-and-coming rockstar for hosting MongoDB® and cloud computing in general back in 2013. We were the first DBaaS platform to launch support for MongoDB® on DigitalOcean.

Still today, we are the only fully managed DBaaS platform that allows you to automate your hosting for MongoDB® on DigitalOcean and leverage enterprise-grade database management tools to optimize your deployment performance, security, and availability in the cloud.

If you’re interested in trying out some of the advanced capabilities of a DBaaS for MongoDB® on DigitalOcean, you can start a free 7-day trial with no credit card required to explore the automation tools and check out the Compare MongoDB® Providers page to see how we stack up against MongoDB Atlas, mLab, ObjectRocket and Compose for MongoDB®.