Amazon Lightsail vs. Carbonite by OpenText vs. DigitalOcean

We utilized Amazon Lightsail to get a web application proof of concept up and running. It's easy to set up, requires minimal configuration, and lets us to concentrate on the coding. It's designed to help you get started fast and easily, but it's not designed for corporate applications or workloads.

Incentivized

More than enough for small companies with several on-prem servers. In 2021, it wouldn't be wise to pit all important data to a single backup service. Carbonite Server is solid, but it's not 100% reliable so I'd definitely recommend having multiple backup services either on the cloud in conjunction with other backup services so the user has multiple safety nets in case of disaster and failed granular restorations.

Incentivized

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

• Its provide pre configured Apps and operating system
• Very easy to use interface and the cost is also very low
• Integration with other AWS services like route53, S3 etc

Incentivized

• Simple administrative web interface - It's easy to provision users, look at data usage stats, disable users, and update policies to control what folders users are allowed to backup, and what options they can access
• Easy client installation - Installing and updating clients was very simple. The client would notify the user when a new update was approved by the site admins, and they typically went very smoothly.
• Good performance - Backups went fairly fast, and were generally invisible to the user, other than the icon updating on files to indicate whether the current version of a file was backed up or not.

Incentivized

• 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

• slow
• complex integration to AWS Cloudwatch - complex setup required
• No IPv6, a big downside
• less value compared with Linode or Digital Ocean

Incentivized

• While overall file restoration is easy to do, obtaining earlier versions is not as user friendly as it could be. You need to enter a date and click search to bring up the latest versions as of the date entered. That’s fine, but what is missing is the ability to see all versions of an individual file. If I am looking for a past file version I want to be able to view the file history as a subset of that file (in other words I should be able to click a + sign and expand to see past versions of the file). Otherwise I am just guessing which dates the file was changed in the past. Sometimes that’s OK, but Mozy needs to build in this enhanced, but necessary feature.
• A couple of years ago, for non enterprise users, Mozy made radical storage and pricing changes forcing myself and many users off their system, as the price for the same storage was going up significantly. So be careful when using Mozy as past experience has shown they are willing to make major changes regardless of the negative impact on their users.

Incentivized

• 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

Carbonite Server Backup does not integrate or support any reporting; it is not good at it. We required monthly and quarterly reports for audit. If we fail in that we get fined or we have to pay a certain amount of money to customer. It does not support cloud instances and we are using N2WS for the cloud instances. This is an additional burden for customers.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots.

Incentivized

Out of all the vendor we deal with they are one of the best when it comes to customers service. Reliable,you can reach them by telephone easily, Great overall can not say anything to the contrary. Usibility is excellent. I recommend them highly whether you need a simple backup ofr more complex for servers etc.

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I usually find what I need to know by looking in the Carbonite knowledge base online. We haven't had any major problems, usually we just need clarification on a point or more details about a feature so we look it up. We haven't had to call in for help in quite awhile.

Incentivized

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

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality assurance tasks, and provide much more efficient and better apps with our microservices architecture.

Incentivized

Netbak is a great product but we also had a secondary issue of having to backup several PC's on site and at remote locations. Carbonite helped with both and gave us one central admin console to be able to check the progress of all our backups, where netbak would have required us to setup a tunnel or use the internet to move data back to our main office.

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

• Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
• Saved lots of time for our prototyping
• Other VPS providers are better

Incentivized

• We have a safety net that we didn't have before.
• Key players are now backed up through an automated system that was easy to silently install.
• The resources used impacted our exchange server negatively and slowed email until it was disabled.

Incentivized

• 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