Using an Uploads Collection with Digital Ocean (or Vercel) — how does it work?

Hey everyone,

I have a question related to uploads. I'm building a gated content library for a client (funnily enough is a suggested use case for uploads -

)

I created a Media Collection locally (localhost) and uploaded a file. I see that as-per my schema it created an asset folder called 'media' and uploaded the file there. Bam (as

would say) nice and easy, so I love that.

are specifically about hosting this and how uploads would then work:

1. Let's say I hosted with Digital Ocean, and I upload a file, would Payload be able to create the media folder on the Digital Ocean server and upload the file to it without any additional configuration?

2. Assuming my frontend UI uses Next.js to

the site, would I have to trigger a build every time a file is uploaded or could I fetch the uploads in a more dynamic way?

3. It looks like the media folder created is created as part of my Git repo, so would I have to store all of the files on GitHub as well as on Digital Ocean? They are going to have 100's of GB's worth of files stored so that could become an issue.

Really hoping someone can help me understand this as I'm just trying to understand it before passing a cost onto the client. I don't want to get caught out!

Bump

Thanks

— I'm just looking further into using Digital Ocean to host Payload and my website, but the guide linked in the Payload docs is mostly just linking out to Digital Ocean articles. Is there anything more cohesive I could look at that I'm missing?

I have more questions regarding setting up Digital Ocean than I could suitably ask here. I'm not a dev ops person at all and have been comfortably letting Vercel handle all of this for me for years now so diving into SSH and running nginx etc is a little overwhelming for me.