ClearDATA vs. DigitalOcean

ClearDATA recognized their challenges and made efforts to resolve them. However, they learned DR was not their forte. Instead, they turned their focus towards cloud application and data hosting. Considering the relationships built, I would try their services again, especially with some of our applications needing to be moved into a legacy format.

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

• Leadership is very attentive, working hard to forge interpersonal relationships

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

• Support was a challenge. Often tickets would sit until escalated.
• Clear expectations on both sides caused communication challenges.
• Data stored in the cloud was over 7 days old, and if there was a need to restore the data, business continuity would be greatly affected.

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

Zadara: This is our current provider. We have a SaaS (Storage as a Service) solution coupled with cloud disaster recovery. So far, this service has been exemplary.

Incentivized

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

• Hard to say as we never really tested the data recovery, even though it was part of the scope of the project.
• Considering the challenges, I would say we paid for something we didn't receive. However, when escalated we got somewhere.
• From a customer service standpoint, it was 50/50.

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