Likelihood to Recommend DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
Read full review Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone. Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned. Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace. In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services Read full review Likelihood to Renew I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
Read full review If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Read full review Reliability and Availability Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
Read full review Performance Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review Alternatives Considered Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However,
Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.
Read full review LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.
Read full review Scalability Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
Read full review Return on Investment With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt. Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5. Read full review We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive. We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive. A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support. Read full review ScreenShots