Spent a few hours building a simple MongoDB cluster with Digital Ocean VPS. Three nodes: Primary, Secondary and Arbiter. Primary node is located in New York and Secondary node is in San Francisco. Arbiter is also in New York leveraging an existing web server.
Total monthly cost: $15 with 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD on each node, which is way cheaper than buying a MongoDB service from the cloud.
Ping time between NY and SF is about 75ms. Ping time in the same region is less than 1ms.
Everything works so far. Will start testing the cluster…