DigitalOcean vs. Google Compute Engine vs. Proxmox VE

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

You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.

Incentivized

We used Proxmox to implement private cloud services, for clusters
of a small number of servers, from 3 to 11 with and without high
availability. Allways with ZFS file systems, and we used to install the
root pool in SSDs mirrored and use other pools with RAID 10 in groups of
four, for the virtual machines and containers, for the backups and snapshots, we used magnetic disks with RAID 10, in groups of four. Do
not use an even number of servers because does not facilitates the
implementation of High Availability, because the corosync service must
have an odd number of servers to detect a failed server for the quorum
system. We used a variety of servers, from clone PCs with AMD Ryzen with 6 cores and 12 threads with 64 GB of RAM no ECC, to high end servers with 64 cores and 128 threads per cpu and 2 cpus per server, with AMD EPYC Rome or Milan, 2 terabytes of RAM ECC.

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

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

Incentivized

• BackUp System, provides extensive propiertes and verifications. An exclusive server for BackUp Administration (PBS)
• Hardware Customization. You can select several properties to adapt the hardware to your needs
• Easy administration. You will be able to manage the server with easily accessible tools such as the web console and usage statistics.
• Certificates Administration.

• 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

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

Incentivized

• The web UI does not work as well on mobile devices. It is useable, but a mobile optimised / responsive UI would be nice to have. There is a mobile app, so that may alleviate this issue, but I have not yet tried it.
• Support in the community forums could be better. There are paid support plans, but new users trying out the software will not have access to this. Answers to questions can sometimes be terse, and I can imagine this may put some people off.
• The wiki is a bit hit and miss with certain topics. I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish. I'd love to see it opened up for the community to add to.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.

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

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

The interface is easy to use for most of it, but still lacks screens for some configurations. Also, a few of the screens are not as intuitive as they could be. This is specially true with disk and network configuration, where some graphic/visual representations of the configurations would be very useful

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired

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

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?

Incentivized

It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes

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

Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE is cheaper than VMware, especially upscaling an HA architecture. Compared with other free or less expensive solutions, Proxmox VE is high compatible with more types of hardware solutions and more VM types. From my point of view, Proxmox VE has no competitor at the same price level, it offers the most complete and production-ready HA solution.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.

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

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

Incentivized

• Due to the open source nature of Proxmox, we have no licensing costs while training our employees
• We've migrated 100% of our clients to Proxmox and have found improved uptime, and flexibility.
• In the 10 years of using Proxmox, we've yet to lose any data or not be notified of backup issues.

Incentivized