Since my time with AWS’s Free Tier is over (RIP), the cheapest options available for server hosting were running a t2.nano EC2 instance ($4.75/month), Digital Ocean Droplet ($5/month), or Amazon Lightsail instance ($5/month). If you’re looking to host your own RStudio Server or Shiny Server, and especially if you’re looking to run them in a low-cost AWS Lightsail environment, take a peek at my takeaways from below! I think you’ll find the “swap” and “R package” sections to be particularly helpful if your configuration is similar to mine. This server would allow me to ditch my patchwork of computers and environments and also provide an ability to host Shiny apps, making it perfect to support this blog.

Even with my code in a Git repository, I was still dealing with package inconsistencies across R environments, differing file paths, and more - needless issues that took me away from the analysis at hand.Ĭombined with a desire to have an always-on machine available to host Shiny apps, I decided to provision my own cheap, always-up cloud server to run RStudio and Shiny Server. I’ve been mucking around in R quite a bit lately and have grown tired of all the annoying configuration changes that are required to take your data/analysis from one machine to another.

R shiny server cost