DigitalOcean vs. FatCow

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

I honestly can't speak to whether FatCow would be well suited for large companies. But for independent contractors, bloggers, and entrepreneurs, FatCow is a perfect fit. If you're a novice user, their tools and interface allow you to build a site quickly. For advanced users, the clean interface makes it simple to find what you need. One-click installation of web applications is awesome. I haven't updated my site in a while, but they provide a great platform for those looking to showcase their portfolios and blogs.

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

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• Flexibility of how you want to use it (WordPress, HTML coding, Wix, etc)
• Unlimited storage for all your website needs
• Reasonable rates as compared to other hosting services

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• 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 was very disappointed with my initial renewal. I understood that the price I had paid was an introductory price, but the renewal rate was much higher than I anticipated. They could be more transparent with their renewals.

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.

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

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

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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

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

Before choosing FatCow, I looked into a few services. As this was 9 years ago, the options weren't as diverse as they are now. GoDaddy was the most popular at the time, but the rates were significantly higher for a smaller package, and they had a pretty sexist ad campaign at the time that really turned me off of their services. Since choosing FatCow, I have looked into using WP Engine as I do my website in WordPress, but it wasn't worth it to move it over at the time and I elected to stick with what I had.

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

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• 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

• Integration of Google Analytics made it simple to see where traffic comes from.
• Ease of use frees me up to focus on communicating ideas rather than fighting with software to make it work.
• Stability makes it perfect to showcase my work.

Incentivized