DigitalOcean vs. Microsoft Azure vs. MSP360 Backup

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

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.

For any Managed Service Provider (MSP) that offers backups services to its clients, Cloudberry MBS is a winning solution. It is fast, powerful, flexible and priced to provide room for decent profit margins for the MSP. MSP's that handle clients so large that they need Appliance-based backups and recovery will need more sophisticated (read pricier) solutions, but for the vast majority of customers that have 1-10 servers, CloudberryLab MBS is an excellent solution.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Great management panel from the web. You can add and configure existing backup plans without access to the endpoint server.
• You can limit cloud usage for customers and servers.
• You can transfer entire servers or virtual machines to cloud.
• You can backup files, disks, or virtual machines to local and cloud locations.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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.

• Message errors are hard to understand
• Should add a general interface to manage all accounts, not a specific interface for every account.
• The new backup formats enhancements should be available for all cloud storage companies. More focus with Wasabi would be great because of their focus on storage and low prices.

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

Incentivized

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 love Cloudberry. I am using it at three different sites to backup their mission critical file servers and it works great. It is a very cost effective backup solution that is easy to setup and use and the support is also very good. I would recommend it to anyone that needs a good backup solution for their business.

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

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.

Incentivized

The screens are very easy to understand and very detailed. I have not had any issues finding what I was looking for or understanding what options to use to create my backups. Cloudberry has a simple easy to use interface that is well designed and the documentation is excellent compared to some other backup software I have used in the past.

Incentivized

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

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It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

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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

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!

Incentivized

I have not had to reach out to their support. However, when we were elvaluating options and looking at MSP360, their reps did a great job. They were able to answer our questions quickly, andf had a real understanding of their product and all the ways that it could be deployed.

Incentivized

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.

Easy and successful implementation and the results have been very good with no issues since the install and go live. I highly recommend Cloudberry Backup software to anyone needing an easy to install, setup and manage backup solution. Excellent product with great features and reliability at a very good price point.

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

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.

Incentivized

We have looked into other backup providers, but it has all come down to value for the dollar. While some providers are more polished or have better name brand recognition, MSP360 has all the core components and is just as strong of a platform for considerably fewer investment costs. MSP360 is also much more MSP centric in that they allow MSPs to operate with reselling the platform without breaking the bank and being much more competitive to prospective clients than the other larger backup providers.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Since switching from Mozy Pro to Cloudberrylab four years ago, our ROI has been extremely positive. The reliability of the product has improved significantly such that we do not need to dedicate much staff time to monitor/manage the backups on a daily basis.
• By designating a backup specialist within our organization tasked with keeping up with the latest features, testing restores, and fixing any issues that arise with client backups, we have a high level of efficiency and can respond to restore requests in a very short timeframe.
• We have been able to lower the per GB price to our customers and still maintain our overall profitability for our backup service

Incentivized