Canonical OpenStack vs. DigitalOcean

Ubuntu OpenStack is well suited for startups where there are very tight financial constraints. As Ubuntu OpenStack is open source, the startup organizations will not have to spend a lot when compared to their commercial offerings in the market. Ubuntu OpenStack is less appropriate in organizations where they don't want to have private on-prem clouds. As deploying a private on-prem cloud is a very cumbersome and tedious task, the organizations must have a dedicated team to manage such on-prem deployments.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use, learning curve is very short. Don't need to invest months of training before using it
• Well suited with Jenkins for automated tests
• Works well on large sets of heterogeneous hardware

• 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

• More customizable options while choosing virtual machine configurations would be great.
• To have regular online learning sessions directly from Ubuntu OpenStack experts [to] help users and for those who implement it.
• Giving admin more control on what privileges they can grant to 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

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

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

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

Everybody knows VMWare which is the world's number one in data center infrastructure management. OpenStack is lot lot less expensive but doesn't offer all the functionalities you have with VMWare especially for High Availability and load balancing. You should go for OpenStack if you need an easy to use solution without the need for external consultants. If you don't have the capacity to manage your own infrastructure you had better go for VMWare.

Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Lighter on initial spending for the organization.
• Deployments which have no vendor locking makes management decisions easier.
• Support from great community saved lot of time for engineers managing it.

Incentivized

• With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt.
• Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5.

Incentivized