Azure Backup vs. DigitalOcean vs. UpCloud

Azure Backup is suitable for companies of various sizes, with varying amounts of data. The cost of the investment should be thought out carefully so that there are no bad surprises with unnecessary files going to Azure Backup. The interface is friendly and easy to configure and it does not require your company to have a backup expert. It is highly recommended for companies with smaller number of servers and better if the servers are already running in an Azure environment.

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

If you're looking for a cost-effective solution then this is a good choice, be sure to keep on top of your balance! The 100% uptime is also a nice addition, although not unique in a cloud hosting service.

Incentivized

• Azure Backup excels at protecting both cloud and on-premises workloads, enabling organizations to adopt a unified backup strategy.
• Azure Backup performs application‑consistent backups, capturing full application state, including in-memory data and pending transactions.
• Azure Backup requires no backup servers, appliances, or tapes. Azure Backup includes multiple built‑in ransomware mitigation features.

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

• Pricing
• Ease of use - super easy to manage existing servers and deploy new ones
• Great customer service

Incentivized

• Having an admin console that you can use to manage backup schedules across your network would be useful. Going machine to machine to check the current settings is ok but would be better in a GUI.
• Maybe an agent utility installed on each workstation where the user can specify or customize the backup, perhaps just a set of folders, or ignore certain folders, would be helpful to eliminate garbage in the cloud.

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

• The billing reports are quite hard to read, could be simplified
• A control panel function would be useful
• The re-billing process could be better, not so cut throat if you miss a payment!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Azure backup is easy to implement, accessible by using the web portal GUI, and has the ability to restore at the file level or the complete VM. We have experienced zero issues with the backup process or performing file-level restorations. We have not restored an entire VM to date.

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

One of the differentials of the solution is the high level of guarantee and support of the Azure Backup solution. Microsoft is a reference in a technology company with a highly trained support team and helps us with any questions or technical problems with the tool. Service is fast and efficient with trained engineers.

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

Azure Backup works on Azure, the most famous of the cloud systems that the whole world has switched to, which is now a very large part of the Microsoft ecosystem that we have been used to using for years. Therefore, it is less tiring to use the additional service of an infrastructure that we already use, even if it is a part of it, which can be easily integrated with existing systems, which is one of the most important issues we IT professionals pay attention to. For this reason, we wanted to swim in familiar waters instead of another brand.

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

We trialed UpCloud to see if it would be better than DigitalOcean but for our needs, it was not. On DigitalOcean once a droplet is created, almost no thought needs to go into maintenance, outages, or other reliability-based issues.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It allowed us to have our VMs protected very quickly and with simple implementation.
• It saved us from taking backups from Azure workloads from the on-prem environment, or even deploying a Backup environment on the cloud.
• It has a low/'controlled' cost as you "pay-as-you-go."

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

• The low cost means you don't really need to worry about pricing
• To us as a business it was not as useful as DigitalOcean

Incentivized