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 If you've got a WordPress site and are unhappy with the performance, support or price of your current hosting service, SiteGround is well worth checking out as it excels in all those areas. From a single one-off blog, to more robust hosting packages, they offer a range of options that are well-suited to any budget or service need. Everybody, from noobs to experienced developers needs support from time to time, and SiteGround's team is the best I've seen. Not only are they easy to communicate with and highly proficient to solve any issue I've thrown their way, they're also easy to reach with multiple access options with minimal wait times.
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 You get a number of page views as a guide to your bandwidth, and a fixed amount of disk space on the server. So you know what you have to work with. No hazy promises of “unlimited” resources. If you pay more, you’re allocated a server with fewer accounts, so there’s less chance you’ll be slowed down by your neighbors. Its self-help material is pretty good — close to InMotion Hosting for knowledgebase quality. SiteGround tackles slow speeds from all angles, using SSD storage, Nginx, SuperCacher, CloudFlare CDN, and HHVM. 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 Business model and clarity about prices after the second year Server Performance when it's stressed or under a big volume of traffic Upgrading model. Sometimes I felt like it was mandatory to update and pay more for basic needs, even with low traffic volumes 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 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 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 I don't feel stress about the website and emails hosted with SiteGround. I like the customer/tech support, the agents are always polite and ready to find a solution. My websites are secure and has a free SSL certificate - I can get on with my business. The boost in speed to the webpage loads is a big bonus especially when designing and developing websites online. They also provide tips and how to videos on various topics which is valuable learning tool.
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 I used Namescheap in the past. I believe Namescheap is a big company compared to SiteGround, as big as godaddy. I think because of that, you get what you expect. Good services, but maybe more costly and you have to pay for everything as extra. Email $5, SSL $10, CDN $10 etc In my opinion, SiteGround actually has packages that make sense for wordpress hosting. If my website gets a lot of traction in the future, I will need to upgrade from the current plan and maybe move away from SiteGround.
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 All the sites I've set up at SiteGround are performing faster than they did at their previous hosting provider. This yields a superior customer experience and higher Google/SEO rankings. Their service has been rock solid, necessitating little support (which is admittedly less than ideal for my support business, but a boon for my clients bottom line) and zero downtime. Easy to get new sites up and running, which speeds creation of new businesses and rapid deployment of conceptual campaigns. Read full review ScreenShots