A2 Hosting vs. DigitalOcean vs. Liquid Web

Never would I recommend this company to anyone. [In my experience] they are total nightmares to deal with and depend on. You can't depend on them at all. Plus, [I feel that] they lie and manipulate the search queries based on lies (they do NOT have radio hosting yet they have ads saying that they do).

DigitalOcean is perfect for hosting client websites, running marketing tools, and managing media storage with Spaces and CDN. The use of Droplets to quickly launch landing pages or WordPress sites for campaigns is a Godsend. It’s great for fast, cheap, and scalable solutions. But for complex microservices or projects needing strict compliance (like HIPAA), DigitalOcean may not always be the best fit, but that depends heavily on your project.

Incentivized

Liquid Web is suitable for serious users who have high end web applications or critical business oriented websites. cPanel and WHM comes out of the box with almost every server you buy. And if you don't have time to manage your own server, Liquid Web will suit you well. Their support is awesome. They help beyond the scope of the support. I had to migrate almost 25 big sites to another Liquid Web server, the support guys made it so easy for me.

Incentivized

• the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price

• DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
• The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
• DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
• DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
• DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials

Incentivized

• Customer Service — Amazing support, if needed.
• Site Speed — Our website sped up by 50% just by moving our hosting to Liquid-Web.
• Knowledge — We've learned a lot as an organization by following the Liquid Web blog.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] customer service is awful.
• [From what I've seen] they don't care about clients.
• [In my situation their] first reaction is always to blame it on the unmanaged factor.

• Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
• While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
• There are no regions available on South America.
• They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.

Incentivized

• The tutorial area is excellent, but perhaps they could add video tutorial.
• Chat conversations should be added automatically to the client portal.

Incentivized

Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.

I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!

Incentivized

[In my opinion] it barely works.

I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.

Incentivized

they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption

Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.

Incentivized

They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!

Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.

Incentivized

In my opinion they are unresponsive, rude, incompetent, and untrustworthy to boot.

They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.

Incentivized

[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.

DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. Amazon has a complex UI and is on the expensive side. DigitalOcean is simple to use and is easily manageable and the servers can easily be set up without additional cost and such.

Incentivized

We evaluated Kinsta and WPEngine. Both offer great platforms but the lack of solid phone support and the substantial difference in server resource allocation made Liquid Web a clear winner.

Incentivized

I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less

Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] they have upheaved my entire business many times by not having working servers.
• [I feel like] they have inconvenienced us many hours with tech calls over stupid things.
• [In my opinion] they have wasted so much time and man hours.

• Positive - Elastic computer instances make it possible to pay for only for what you need.
• Positive - Competitive pricing - some of the products that DigitalOcean offers are much cheaper than those offered by competitors.
• Negative - Having to go to other cloud computing platforms for more specific, advanced services like Computer Vision optimized services, GPU cloud compute instances, etc...

Incentivized

• Liquid-Web has made it easier for me to take my focus away from handling constant server issues to being able to focus on my actual job in managing our websites. While there may not be a concrete number for this scenario, being able to perform my tasks more efficiently definitely helps company growth in the long run.

Incentivized