A2 Hosting vs. DigitalOcean vs. Upsun

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

In our organisation we are the only team that uses Platform.sh to host any site. This was a cost effective way for us as we were using Acquia Cloud earlier for these websites. We mostly use Platform.sh for those sites which are always in development as it is simpler and faster to handle these operations in Platform.sh. Then we do a lift and shift to Acquia as we move more towards the go live and post production maintenance side.

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

• As this is a PaaS it mitigates the complexities of a Cloud infrastructure like Acquia
• We are easily able to integrate our sites with different technologies like Python and Rest
• Helps us in providing Continuous Development cloud deployment hosting solution

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

• Platform.sh is not for beginners in my opinion. It has a good amount of learning curve in my opinion.
• As this is a PaaS, teams habituated with cloud infrastructure may miss the server side support from their cloud teams. I believe you will have to work on server bugs more on your own.
• During normal maintenance periods, integrations may fail if you are working on your sites in that time, in my experience.

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

In our team we use Platform.sh mostly while sites are in developmental phase. Then we do a lift and shift to either Acquia or AWS depending on the type of sites we have. Platform.sh is really cost effective and more fluid in terms of Continuous Development hence the usage. After said development is done, we generally lift and shift to Acquia for more content heavy sites and to AWS for more transaction oriented sites.

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

• Continuous development for sites in build has been fluid
• Platform.sh is really cost effective when comparing to AWS or Acquia Cloud
• On the other side, lack of server side support demands a big learning curve from its users in my opinion.

Incentivized