DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Heroku Platform
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on
a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric
approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and
workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku
Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime.
Heroku Developer Experience (DX)
Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$85
per month
WP Engine
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.
$35
per month
Pricing
DigitalOcean
Heroku Platform
WP Engine
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Startup
$35
per month
Core
$400
per month (annual contract)
Enterprise
Custom
*Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean
Heroku Platform
WP Engine
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
Discount available for annual billing on the Startup plan.
DigitalOcean is fast, easy to use, reliable, with few features, and at a great price. WP Engine is clunky, tricky to use, reliable, feature rich, and at a very high price. GoDaddy is clunky, difficult to use, too complex to be reliable, rife with garbage feature 'add-ons', and …
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS OpsWorks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price …
Cheaper than Heroku which is prohibitively expensive for a small self-funded startup. We quickly outgrew their free tier and migrated to DigitalOcean. AWS is more feature complete however, we found its maintenance overly confusing and not as well thought out. For many use cases …
DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with …
DigitalOcean easily has the most flexibility, best pricing, and best ease of use, of the competitors we had used. Rackspace offers better engineer access and support, but this comes at a very significant cost. Heroku offers a cloud container system, which has less maintenance, …
EngineYard is much more similar to Heroku than the other two services I've compared it to. Frankly, I don't see much advantage of EngineYard over Heroku - EngineYard feels a little more "bare metal" than Heroku and it's easy to get to log into a "real server," but it's …
Heroku Platform is cheaper to begin with compared to DigitalOcean or Amazon Fargate. The configuration user interface is also arguably easier to understand. With its user friendliness and cheaper tiers, Heroku Platform was our pick to host some of our applications that were …
Heroku has the easy facility to deploy and host applications while others have to configure a lot. The price of the services is high for others. But within Heroku pricing and easy to maintain under the same roof.
By usability, DigitalOcean wins. I love DigitalOcean for a lot of reasons, but their setup process is clunky and their feature set is fairly limited. Their setup requires technical competence but after that they are a breeze to work with. For what they do, DigitalOcean is …
I have used WP Engine for several years and love the service. Their technology, security, speed & support are unparralleled. I've had to file several support tickets & the experience was really good every time. Being a consultant & tech integrator, I often have to deal with B2B …
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.
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
I am an enterprise user of WordPress and host over 7000 sites with WPEngine. Areas that I think they are well suited for include customers that need enterprise-level support and uptime and have more complex needs than a simple blog. They also manage scale well with a variety of isolated install options that you can scale up or down depending on your contract needs. They also provide premier support for enterprises and have highly knowledgable Technical Account Managers that provide a significant value add. If I were to look at where it isn't as appropriate for usage I would focus on the low-end needs and say while they do support small sites, there are options out there for cheaper hosting that lack the support a WPEngine gives you.
Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.
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.
Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
I'd like to see WP Engine offer their own monitoring solution. When I say monitoring, I mean specific use cases that may end up being something you could script. This would keep customers from having to pay for additional services like Pingdom, New Relic, etc.
I would like to see some proactive analysis done by WP Engine on their customer sites - at least on their home pages, and offer up suggestions. This kind of goes along with the other example.
Finally, it would be nice to see a "lighter" offering, perhaps a plan that costs $49 for those who want to host only a few sites, or even 1 site.
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.
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.
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
From the onboarding and in the days afterward, it was very easy to get into the platform and begin creating important websites and configuring user options. The interface is easy to navigate, and the platform pages load quickly. Since the platform is built for Word plus press, it has features including backup, staging, maintenance mode, and direct WP-Admin login to make configuration and site management faster. We have never had any issues on the billing side of the account.
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
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.
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
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.
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never used Network Solutions for our own hosting needs, but when we do interact with them on behalf of our clients, their systems always seem to be clunky and hard to use, and they often overcharge customers by selling them products they do not need.
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...
