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
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are customizable, public or private, cloud-based servers available from IBM. User can launch applications and software across blended, hybrid environments as the servers integrate with all cloud models.
$0.01
per hour
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
DigitalOcean
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
Microsoft Azure
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (dedicated host)
starting at $0.22
per hour
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (dedicated host)
starting at $149.00
per month
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (multi-tenant)
starting at $0.038
per hour
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (multi-tenant)
starting at $25.21
per month
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (reserved)
starting at $0.02
per hour
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (reserved)
starting at $13.27
per month
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (transient)
starting at $0.01
per hour
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
Microsoft Azure
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
IBM Cloud virtual servers include 250 GB of outbound public bandwidth, unmetered inbound public bandwidth, and unmetered private and management network bandwidth.
The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
Vultr is a new player in the game. They don't advertise their hardware model and for that reason, people may not trust them. I have run few benchmarks on Vultr, they performed slightly better than DigitalOcean but they aren't trustworthy. Their transparency index is very low …
I've tried both AWS and Azure and, while they're both great solutions, they are much more challenging to setup and maintain. The idea that my billing could spike because of something unexpected leaves me a tad uneasy. For our solutions I'd rather pay the $10/mo with …
Initially we started using DigitalOcean due to their pricing point as we were in development phase. Slowly when we used it, we starting liking it a lot as it is very fast & easy to get started, compared to the other Cloud Providers we've used. Also they have blogs and …
DigitalOcean offers low prices, much lower than AWS (Azure) however AWS provides much more features and better performance than DigitalOcean.
I chose DigitalOcean to save myself some money.
Microsoft Azure has an extremely poor UX experience, from trying to tell how much a service will cost, to actually physically finding how to set one up through the web UI. The UX of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is much better, they're easier to setup and they show you what their …
We mostly use IBM Cloud Virtual Servers. IBM provides a better choice of locations, easy to use interface and APIs for management, and better pricing compared to similar providers.
Overall, IBM is more expensive, but provides a lot of support for these cloud virtual servers as well as makes it very easy to configure these servers to the desired needs. The usability of IBM is sometimes not as good as others, but the availability of these servers is fairly …
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers had a slightly lower cost (possibly due to reseller discount) compared to both Azure Virtual Machines and AWS Cloud9, although not significantly lower. IBM has better support for Linux compared to Azure but that gap is narrowing recently as Microsoft …
AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Been there done that. It's only because of our software affiliation that we chose to go with IBM Cloud. That's not a bad thing but just that there's really no major difference other than the lack of guidance and IBM cloud engineers as …
I would say that Azure stacks up pretty good and sometimes better in comparison to what Google Cloud Platform has to offer. I don't like GCP for its absurd licensing fees and it's expensive for just Using EC2 Instances. However, DigitalOcean and AWS can offer far better …
We have settled with Microsoft Azure considered its effective administration and the ability to data visualization and analysis, together with the top-notch security/stability.
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.
One scenario that immediately came to my mind was large-scale data processing, IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is well-suited for organizations that require high-performance computing capabilities, particularly when processing large amounts of data. It can also be useful for companies or organizations that wish to migrate their workplace to the cloud and it may suite companies that have strict compliance requirements since the servers have robust security features.
Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
Scalability: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers enable businesses to simply and quickly scale up or down the resources they require in response to changing business demands. This enables firms to respond to traffic spikes, requests for new services, or changes in business size without the need for additional hardware purchases or maintenance.
Cost savings: By employing virtual servers in the cloud, enterprises can decrease capital expenditures for hardware and infrastructure while also lowering ongoing operational expenses by removing server maintenance and management costs. This can result in significant cost savings for enterprises, particularly those that need to raise or decrease their computer capacity fast and easily.
High availability: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers is built with high availability in mind, giving enterprises the certainty that their applications and data will be available and accessible even if hardware fails or other disruptions occur. This assists enterprises in maintaining business continuity and lowering the chance of downtime, which is crucial for firms that rely on 24/7 access to their systems. Furthermore, IBM's comprehensive network and security features aid in the prevention of data breaches and other security risks, assuring the availability and reliability of their applications and data.
Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
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.
It would also be nice if there were more templates to choose from when creating a server. Right now there are only a few options, and we'd like to see more variety.
We'd like to see the ability to create server groups. This would make it easier to manage a large number of servers since we could do all of the updates and management tasks for them at once.
There doesn't seem to be a way to automatically install updates on all of the virtual servers. We have to go in and manually update each one, which can be time-consuming. It would be really nice if automatic updates can be done.
The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
It has a flexible and affordable pricing, easy to configure and manage. It is easy to spawn one or multiple instances and have them up and running in no time
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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.
As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
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.
It is adequate, but you need to be ready to argue your point - which is fair enough, I suppose, but being given the opposite of the benefit of the doubt every time does not necessarily result in an enjoyable user experience.
We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers offer more customization options than Amazon EC2, with the ability to select from a range of operating systems, storage types, and network configurations. IBM also provides a wide range of tools and services to help manage and optimize your virtual servers, including a web-based console, CLI, and API.
AWS EC2 is a more managed platform, with a focus on providing a simple and easy-to-use interface. Amazon provides a range of predefined instance types, each with different specs and pricing, to make it easy to find the right option for your needs. AWS also offers a number of management and monitoring tools, but these are often more basic than what is available from IBM.
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment 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...
For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
