Python Agents on DigitalOcean: Deploy in 5 Steps

Originally published at chudi.dev Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to DigitalOcean. If you sign up through these links, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and you get $200 in free credits for 60 days. I ran my trading bot on a DigitalOcean Droplet before migrating to a specialized VPS for lower latency. I recommend DO for Python agents because I used it and it worked. My Python trading bot worked perfectly on my laptop. Asyncio event loop, WebSocket connections to Binance, real-time order placement on Polymarket. Clean code. Passed review. Ran great locally. Then I tried to deploy it. The first attempt was AWS Lambda. Cold starts added 400ms to every signal. The 15-minute timeout killed my long-running WebSocket connections. I spent two days fighting CloudWatch logs before I realized: Lambda was built for HTTP request handlers, not for a process that needs to stay alive. Here's what I wish someone had told me: deploying a Python agent that runs 24/7 costs $6/mon