DigitalOcean vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean
Chose DigitalOcean
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, …
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Chose Rackspace Managed Hosting
Rackspace has infinitely better support than other cloud services providers I have had experience with. Their support via phone and live chat are incredibly knowledgeable and friendly, and I never have to wait longer than I feel is acceptable. Beyond customer service and …
Features
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
9.0
36 Ratings
9% above category average
Rackspace Managed Hosting
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.831 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.832 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.023 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.029 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.435 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.233 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.033 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.732 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation6.45 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.3 out of 10
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(35 ratings)
1.0
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
2.2
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(9 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(9 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
DigitalOcean
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.
Read full review
Rackspace
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.
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Pros
DigitalOcean
  • 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
Rackspace
  • 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
DigitalOcean
  • 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
Rackspace
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
DigitalOcean
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
Rackspace
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!
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Usability
DigitalOcean
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.
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Rackspace
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
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Reliability and Availability
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
Read full review
Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Performance
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
Read full review
Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
DigitalOcean
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.
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Rackspace
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
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Alternatives Considered
DigitalOcean
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.
Read full review
Rackspace
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.
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Scalability
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
Read full review
Rackspace
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
DigitalOcean
  • 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...
Read full review
Rackspace
  • 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
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