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
HostGator
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
HostGator, from Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance), is a web hosting service with WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting capabilities.
$2.75
per month
Shopify
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
As I have said, DigitalOcean was slightly more expensive than something like HostGator, but the amount of customization and quality of service make it worth any difference. AWS was always a pain to set up and use, but DigitalOcean makes it cake.
DigitalOcean and ServerPilot work extremely well together. As for other hosting solutions I feel like I have moved on to the best choice available with DigitalOcean. Times change, and DigitalOcean just feels like the next step in the evolution of hosting providers and I for one …
DigitalOcean has a much lower price point for VPS - but they are not fully managed as with other services. DigitalOcean VPSs are good for quick simple applications that we are comfortable and efficient at deploying ourselves. We do not generally recommend them for clients, as …
We chose HostGator because we were looking for a cloud hosting solution that has cPanel. Other cPanel hostings like SiteGround also provide cPanel cloud hosting but their price is really expensive. Other hosting solutions like DigitalOcean and Vultr are pretty affordable but …
Ultimately, WebHostingPad just didn't have the quality or reliability I needed and full on VPS services like DO or Linode were total overkill. HG is fantastic for "it just works" FTP accessible hosting on a LaMP stack.
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.
HostGator for email, domain and website hosting--delightful, 100% satisfied! Have always had ample capacity for company email needs, features work well. I have used it off and on for several organizations since 2011. HostGator website building is fairly straightforward, although I wouldn't recommend it for first-time web designing. The pluses on the HostGator website builder: great-looking themes, adequate webpage capacity, really cool scrolling capabilities, which trends well now. Easier than building a WordPress website from scratch, which can also be done for free in HostGator. I'd say it's limited compared to feature-rich WP, but it designs as nicely as Wix.
Shopify allowed us to handle matrix items and combined listings. Both of which we could not do on our previous platform. There was some customization involved but overall, it did what we needed it to. The one downside was that if we want to change anything we would have to reload the entire set of matrix items manually.
The pricing is a big feature for this hosting company
Every three years when the hosting contract is coming to an end, they offer a reduced fee to upgrade your server plan, which is more cost effective than renewing at the regular rate for whatever plan you're currently using.
The customer service workers are professional and friendly.
It's base security and integration with trusted security partners (such as NoFraud) is a game-changer when it comes to reliability and a "hands off approach" for our IT department. The up-time is also very good.
It offers a wide range of verified plugins that are (for the most part) easy to install and use for any specific scenario you're looking for.
It's Analytics area in the admin is actually nice and offers a wide variety of reports that you can run.
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.
I would love it if Shopify built an in house app which helped us post UGCs and social proof from platforms such as Instagram, Youtube etc. more seamlessly on our website. Right now, we are able to do it through third party apps but the look and feel is just okay.
Because we have in house technical support to compensate the lack of quality HostGator tech support, and because the price continues to be affordable the business is likely to continue using HostGator. They provide what the business needs and we have in house support to maintain it.
Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!
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.
It is fairly easy to use Shopify regardless of what task you are attempting to perform. Most things are customizable to a degree without requiring coding ability. I have very limited coding experience and have still been able to navigate my way around changing features of the website that require edits to the code with the use of AI and trial-and-error. This previously wasn't possible with the WooCommerce platform.
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.
While you will get support from HostGator, it seems to be a different level from 8-10 years ago. It may take 15-20 minutes to get someone on chat, and unless you follow up, I've found followup email support to take a couple of days. If you stick with it, though, you will get support, and I've never had a problem they couldn't help with.
In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward
Shopify offered us several trainings to setup a Shopify store, how to build a brand, SEO, product photography etc. All this content have been super helpful in our journey.
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.
I prefer HostGator over GoDaddy. HostGator does have better and more reliable customer support, and the user interface and user experience are overall much more friendly and easier to use. GoDaddy does have downtime associated with their hosting in my experience, but I have not experienced that with HostGator.
Big Commerce and SAP Hybris are two other platforms we've investigated and Shopify is by far easiest to use and customize. While it doesn't do everything out of the box, the apps do fill in many gaps. The cost however, is probably the biggest selling point against these other two options.
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...
It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.
