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What changed and why it matters

This is for anyone who read the Hacker News discussion on Internet Archive alternatives and is now weighing whether to self-host a web archive on DigitalOcean instead of relying on one bundled service. The verdict up front: DigitalOcean doesn't sell a single "web archive" product, so the decision isn't which plan to buy — it's which three products to combine, and how big to size each one.

That Hacker News thread is the specific, dated event behind this comparison's timing. You don't need to have read every comment in it to use this page; it's simply the reason "should I run my own archive" became a live question worth pricing out today rather than a hypothetical for later.

Once you decide to self-host, the shape of the problem is the same regardless of which crawler or archiving tool you eventually pick. You need somewhere to run the software that does the crawling, somewhere to store what it collects, and somewhere to index it so old pages are actually searchable rather than just sitting in a folder. DigitalOcean prices those three needs as three separate products — Droplets, Spaces, and Managed PostgreSQL — each on its own page, each checked for this comparison on 2026-08-15. That separation is good for control and bad for a quick answer: there's no single number to compare against a competitor's plan, only three that you add up yourself.

At a glance

The 2 vCPU / 4 GB configuration is the specific Basic Droplet tier checked for this comparison. Exact current rates aren't reproduced here because they change; Check current price for DigitalOcean Basic Droplet (2 vCPU / 4 GB) before you size anything else in the stack, since compute is the one piece every configuration below still needs regardless of how you handle storage or the database.

Notice what the table doesn't say: it doesn't rank the three products against each other, because they're not substitutes. You're not choosing a Droplet instead of Spaces the way you'd choose one hosting plan instead of another. You're deciding whether you need all three, or whether you can get away with fewer for now — which is a different, more useful question than "which is cheapest."

How they differ in practice

The three products differ in what breaks if you skip them, not just in what they cost.

Compute is not optional. The Droplet is the machine that runs whatever crawler and archive software you choose to install — the Hacker News thread doesn't specify a single tool, so this comparison doesn't pick one for you either. There's no version of a self-hosted archive that skips having a server.

Storage is deferrable, briefly. A Droplet ships with its own disk, so a small archive can live there while you're testing the setup. Spaces becomes the deciding factor once the archive outgrows a single disk, or once you want the collected files to survive a Droplet rebuild or redeploy without being lost along with it. Keeping storage on the same disk as the compute that's writing to it is a single point of failure; separating them is the entire reason Spaces exists as its own product rather than a Droplet add-on. Check current price for DigitalOcean Spaces object storage, so you can weigh a dedicated storage line item against simply resizing the Droplet's disk for as long as that's still an option for your archive's size.

The database is the piece people underestimate. An archive without an index is a folder of files you can't search — which defeats the point of archiving in the first place. Running PostgreSQL yourself on the same Droplet is possible and cheaper on paper, but it ties the database's uptime and performance to whatever else that machine is doing, including the crawler that's actively writing to it. Managed PostgreSQL separates the two: the index keeps running even if you're rebuilding or resizing the compute side, at the cost of a line item the self-hosted version doesn't have. Whether that separation is worth paying for depends entirely on how much you're already asking the Droplet to carry, and how bad it would be to lose the index versus just re-crawling.

Put together, the practical difference isn't a feature checklist — it's what each product insures you against. The Droplet is the thing you can't avoid. Spaces insures the files against the compute layer failing. Managed PostgreSQL insures the index against the same thing. Neither insurance is free, and neither is mandatory for a small enough project.

Which to pick

If you're prototyping alone: run the Droplet only. Point PostgreSQL and file storage at the same box until the archive is big enough to make that uncomfortable. This is best for a personal project you're not ready to commit a recurring database bill to before you know if the project sticks. Skip it if you already know the archive needs to survive a server rebuild — in that case, start with Spaces from day one instead of migrating files into it later under pressure.

If other people will rely on it: run all three. Droplet for compute, Spaces so the files outlive any single server, Managed PostgreSQL so the index isn't riding on the same uptime as the crawler that feeds it. This is best for a shared or public archive where losing the index or the files isn't an acceptable outcome for the people depending on it. Skip it if you're the only user and can tolerate rebuilding from scratch — the extra line items aren't buying you anything in that scenario. Before you size the cluster, Check current price for DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL — the managed database is the single piece in this stack most likely to move your monthly total, since Managed PostgreSQL pricing scales with cluster size rather than a flat rate.

If you want the full picture before committing to any of this: See current pricing at the merchant, because all three products sit on the same pricing structure there and the checked date on this comparison won't stay current forever.

The honest answer to "which one" is that this was never a single-product decision. The Droplet is fixed — every configuration above needs it. Spaces and Managed PostgreSQL are the two calls actually worth making, and both come down to the same underlying question: what happens to your archive the day the Droplet it's running on goes away, and how much that answer is worth to you in a monthly bill.