DigitalOcean vs. GreenGeeks

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 are looking for a shared hosting service, Green Geeks pricing is comparable to most vendors. T2 tech support is generally knowledgeable, T1 is responsive via chat, but often is not able to resolve issues (other than KB questions). Load balancing on a shared server is difficult for all vendors, since individual website usage is hard to predict. Vendors have different ways of dealing with this - some simply do not guarantee resource limits (e.g. available memory, PHP threads, etc). Green Geeks does provide resource limits as part of their contracts, but they frequently downgrade those limits, presumably to address overloaded servers. BUT BE AWARE - I believe GreenGeeks uses unethical practices when a customer wants to cancel. It is my personal experience that they make it extremely difficult / impossible to cancel a contract. I feel the process is not transparent and they will ignore emails directing them to cancel. In my experience, they will then proceed to charge customers for a renewed contract. I believe multiple customers have reported this problem.

• 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

• T1 support generally responds w/i 15-30 minutes

• 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

• In my personal experience, the billing department uses unethical practices when customers cancel subs.

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

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

From a technical perspective, all shared server vendors are comparable. Bluehost has terrible customer support. A2 is more expensive, but has more personalized support.

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

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

• Throttling servers impacted website availability.