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Hosting

Whether you plan to install OpenBoxes on-premise or in the cloud, the installation instructions should be relatively similar.

Cloud

Here are a few recommended options for hosting.

Hosting Provider Instance Type Memory vCPU Disk Monthly Cost
Digital Ocean Droplet 4GB 2 80GB $20
Amazon Web Services EC2 t3.medium 4GB 2 8GB $30
Google Compute Engine n1-standard-1 3.75GB 1 30GB $25
Google Compute Engine n1-standard-2 7.5GB 2 30GB $50
Azure VM B2S 4GB 2 8GB $30
RimuHosting Custom VPS 4GB 8 50GB $30
Linode Linode 4GB 4GB 2 80GB $20
Linode Dedicated 4GB 4GB 2 25GB $30

NOTE: AWS has a free-tier that includes a free year of 750 hours per month for t2.micro EC2 instances (as well as other services). It's a great deal it if you're not going to be using OpenBoxes too heavily. Unfortunately, keeping a Java-based web application like OpenBoxes happy on a t2.micro (1GB of RAM) is not easy. You may need to reduce the heap size and permgen memory allocated to Tomcat to something minimal (see Installing Tomcat page).

Note

Please let us know if we missed a good hosting option.

On-Premise

Installing OpenBoxes on-premise requires a bit of work to install the appropriate Ubuntu version on a rack-mounted server, desktop, or laptop that you've designated as your server. Our installation docs will not describe how to install Ubuntu Desktop or Server, so you'll need to consult Ubuntu docs. Here are a few tutorials that might be helpful.

Once Ubuntu is installed, you can continue to the next step (Installing Ubuntu dependencies).

Note

Contact us if you'd like to discuss what it would take to host OpenBoxes in the cloud and on-premise. This can be useful if Internet and power are unreliable as well as if you have teams distributed across multiple facilities or in multiple countries.