Alternatively, you can sign up using my referral link to DigitalOcean which gives you $10 credit. You would need to provide your credit card details on signing up even if you are using free credits. Therefore, the built in storage was not important to me.įirst, go to DigitalOcean’s website to create your account. I wanted to use my Plex media server to distribute media streaming content. I will update if there’s a way to link say OneDrive or Google Drive to the Plex media server. You could include access to another web-based storage, like AWS S3 or Bitcasa which will increase the monthly charges though. That’s barely enough for a season of TV Shows or a few movies. For the basic tier, it is only 20GB of storage. DigitalOcean may not be the best choice for Plex, largely because of the limited storage space it offers. In this guide I will be focusing on how to set up Plex on a DigitalOcean Droplet. I guess you could create a snapshot and destroy the server when not needed. Powering off the server will see you still consume computer resources and be charged accordingly. At $5 a month, I could operate the server for close to two years! I initially thought I could configure the on/off time for the server to reduce my monthly bill even further. The below steps would largely apply to other VPS / cloud providers but I decided to go with DigitalOcean because of the free credit. I was looking at a few of the more common cloud options, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean and a few others came to mind but I settled for DigitalOcean thanks to the free $100 credit for education-linked sign up through Github. The other reason was to access US-based content as Plex would be running on a foreign IP, and could access to Plex channels.

It allows me to have my Plex server permanently on, and not having to leave my computer on all the time at home. I was looking at setting up a Plex Media Server on the cloud for a couple of reasons.

Plex media server ubuntu 14.04