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DigitalOcean is a versatile platform that has been widely adopted for various use cases by different types of users. For web developers …
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What is DigitalOcean?
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.
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- Pre-defined machine images (29)8.787%
- Dynamic scaling (28)8.282%
- Monitoring tools (30)7.777%
- Operating system support (29)7.777%
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1GB-16GB
$5.00
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8GB-160GB
$60.00
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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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MICROWEBER TUTORIAL + DEMO + INSTALL + REVIEW
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DigitalOcean Swimmer Demo
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What is DigitalOcean?
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.
Deployment
Create managed Kubernetes clusters just by specifying the size and location of worker nodes
Standard, general purpose, or CPU-optimized compute types
App marketplace
Global availability
Scalability
Scale up, scale down, or migrate between Droplets (virtual machines)
Distribute traffic across droplets
Redirect network traffic
Hourly billing
Storage
Managed MySQL, Redis, or PostgreSQL databases
Store and retrieve any amount of data (audio, video, etc.)
SSD-based storage support
Backups and snapshots
Security
Cloud firewalls
Private networking
Two-factor authorization and centralized billing
Monitoring
Native integration
Resource usage reports and graphs
Real-term alerts and notifications
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Premium Droplets by DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Pre-configured templates highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of DigitalOcean are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
DigitalOcean is a versatile platform that has been widely adopted for various use cases by different types of users. For web developers and engineers, DigitalOcean offers a seamless hosting solution for websites and web applications, allowing them to easily set up and manage their own servers. This includes hosting personal and professional websites, managing documentation for migration and setup, as well as providing support throughout the process. Customers have praised DigitalOcean for its user-friendly interface and the ability to quickly spin up servers for testing new WordPress 'stacks' within minutes.
In addition to web hosting, DigitalOcean is also utilized by organizations for cloud computing needs. This includes hosting cloud instances, managing DNS records, utilizing floating IP addresses, deploying Kubernetes instances, and setting up load balancers. The flexibility and scalability of DigitalOcean's services allow organizations to easily adapt their infrastructure based on their specific requirements. Moreover, development teams appreciate the low-cost reliable servers and support provided by DigitalOcean when it comes to developing, testing, and deploying production infrastructure.
One notable use case is DustMoon, a media company that switched to DigitalOcean for hosting their website. They reported improved performance after moving to an entry-level VPS plan. Another use case involves customers using DigitalOcean to host custom scheduling software publicly, eliminating the need for VPN accounts or exposing servers to public access, thus enhancing security in the process.
DigitalOcean's simplicity, flexibility, and affordability make it an attractive option for both small client projects and larger organizations. Customers highly recommend DigitalOcean as a web hosting service due to its fantastic performance at a great price point. However, while users appreciate the features provided by DigitalOcean, some have suggested that the support could be more effective. Overall, DigitalOcean has proven to be a reliable solution for various cloud computing needs such as hosting websites and web apps, running microservices, and launching prototypes quickly and cost-effectively.
Developer-friendly tools and APIs: Users have expressed their appreciation for the developer-friendly tools and APIs provided by DigitalOcean, finding them useful and conducive to efficient development processes. Several reviewers have stated that these tools have made it easier for them to develop and manage their cloud resources effectively.
Great documentation: The comprehensive and well-structured documentation offered by DigitalOcean has been highly praised by users. Many reviewers have found the documentation to be helpful, particularly when setting up various configurations and services. They have highlighted its wide coverage of topics as a valuable resource for guidance.
Active and helpful community: The active and supportive community of DigitalOcean has garnered positive feedback from users. They have commended the community's responsiveness in providing assistance whenever needed. Reviewers also appreciate the availability of official help articles and public forums, which contribute to their positive experience with the platform.
Limited product offerings: Some users have mentioned that DigitalOcean offers a limited range of products compared to other cloud providers, specifically noting the absence of enterprise-level options such as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, and Oracle products. This may be a drawback for users who require a wider variety of services.
Limited number of regions: Users have expressed concern about the limited availability of data center regions in DigitalOcean. While the platform is expanding rapidly and introducing new data centers, some reviewers feel that having fewer options could be disadvantageous for those who require specific geographical locations.
Complex email server setup: Setting up email servers on DigitalOcean can be complex according to some users, leading them to recommend external services like Zoho instead. The intricate process may pose challenges for users who prefer a simpler email setup within the DigitalOcean platform.
Users have made several recommendations based on their experiences with DigitalOcean. The three most common recommendations are:
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Users suggest DigitalOcean as a good choice for enterprise or small-medium businesses, but not for beginner individual developers. They appreciate the ease of setup compared to other cloud providers.
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Use DigitalOcean for hosting projects with great support and functionalities. Users find DigitalOcean to be an excellent platform for hosting web applications, virtual machines, and VPS servers. They recommend using DigitalOcean for quick and affordable hosting needs, especially for small projects or users with limited server management experience.
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Consider DigitalOcean as a reliable cloud provider for startups or new companies looking to quickly create a backend infrastructure or cloud-based computing. Users mention that DigitalOcean is easy to use, provides transparent monthly billing, and offers straightforward pricing. They also appreciate helpful documentation, interesting promotions, inbuilt monitoring, and consistent service without surprises at the end of the month.
Overall, users find DigitalOcean to be a competitive option in the market with flexible tariffs, easy setup, strong functionality, and affordability.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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June 28, 2021
Best Affordable and Inexpensive Virtual Servers
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool so as to control the virtual server in the cloud. It's widely used in our organization so that the servers can be allocated in multiple regions as per our needs. It's a highly scalable and flexible tool to host websites and web apps that allows us to use our own servers as well. The performance is great and the server cost is inexpensive. The user can eventually have full control over the machine with its user friendly interface.
- Reporting and support.
- Ease of use.
- Flexibility and scalability.
- Less cost involved as compared to other products which makes it an affordable product.
- Upgrading of hardware is also quite easy and doesn't require much effort.
- Customer support could be improved.
- Lack of CDN.
- Documentation is poor.
April 30, 2021
One of the best dedicated server platforms!
DigitalOcean is used to host our apps and website. Before using it, we were using share-hosting and were having issues with website speed and capacity at peak times. Our website often crashed for too many people at the same time on it, so we decided to change to dedicated servers and ended up choosing DigitalOcean.
- Scalable hosting
- Price is really good compared to competition
- Customer support is really efficient and fast to reply
- The console is not really efficient and stable
- Need to pay for backup droplets
April 30, 2021
DigitalOcean for the win
We are using DigitalOcean for storing our statics website and WordPress websites. With DigitalOcean we were able to migrate from AWS and unlock [an] easier, cheaper cloud platform. With DigitalOcean we are able to [set up] a scalable server easily and as [quickly] as possible[.]
- Prices
- Easy to use
- UI
- IAM needs improvements
- CDN
March 12, 2021
Why DigitalOcean Dominates the VPS Market
DustMoon is a media company that publishes hand-picked stories from the tech. I founded the company with some help from my colleagues. DustMoon quickly outgrew shared hosting with over 500K visits per month. We then decided to try out DigitalOcean as it is the most hyped VPS provider at that time. It exceeded our expectations with its performance. We used the entry-level VPS with 512MB RAM. Configuration: Nginx, Redis, MariaDB & Varnish. Adding Varnish to the stack is our best decision. We load tested our server stack with Blitz and it successfully handled 3-4.5 million visits with a very low response times.
And thereafter, we implemented the same stack for our sister network, consisting of 3 sites.
And thereafter, we implemented the same stack for our sister network, consisting of 3 sites.
- The network transit carriers they use are great. They use Tier-1 network providers making a website hosted on DigitalOcean super fast to most of the viewers in every country.
- Hardware: I had visited DigitalOcean Bangalore collocation provider after getting an approval for a hackathon. They're using the Dell Rack Servers with Samsung SSDs. I'm really happy to be running on DigitalOcean.
- Customer Support: These guys always excelled it. Excellent support personnel with sound technical knowledge.
- More products. Like Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers, DigitalOcean should have launched other products like CDN, and more.
- Customer Support: Customer Support personnel were warming and great. The only downside is they take a bit longer to respond.
- The documentation doesn't get updated very frequently and errors and bugs were not addressed properly.
November 19, 2019
Developer-friendly cloud provider
Right now it's used to host the entire infrastructure of a SaaS ERP system. It helps running and to scale the systems with developer-friendly tools and easy-to-understand prices.
We use several Virtual Machines to host our different services from our SOA architecture (Nginx load balancer/API proxy, PostgreSQL DB instance, APIs servers, and Nginx Web Servers) together with some networking services like Private Network and Public Floating IPs.
We use several Virtual Machines to host our different services from our SOA architecture (Nginx load balancer/API proxy, PostgreSQL DB instance, APIs servers, and Nginx Web Servers) together with some networking services like Private Network and Public Floating IPs.
- Developer-friendly tools and APIs.
- Great documentation.
- Awesome community and support.
- Good and clean UI for cloud resources management.
- Nice collection of products which is growing all the time adding new products every year.
- 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.
We use it to host a couple of websites, APIs, and apps for our organization.
- Easy to set up.
- Extremely affordable.
- Upgrade hardware on the fly.
- None I can think of. I have had multiple hosts and none have stacked up to the flexibility and ease of use.
We've used DigitalOcean for running microservices. It's only used by our development team and isn't often used by other departments. It isn't our primary hosting service (we use AWS/Heroku) but I've used it both at work and on personal projects to quickly and cheaply launch prototypes. DigitalOcean is better for people who are a little more technical but it has some nice templated hosting solutions (e.g. WordPress) that less technical members of the team can use.
- 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
- Although I've never had issues with droplets, DigitalOcean occasionally has service outages in their deployment services.
- It would be nice if DigitalOcean provided a means to cap egress billing (e.g. lock out an instance that is unintentionally ramping up a large bill)
- I like that DigitalOcean spaces are compatible with S3 but it would be nice if they scaled in terms of space and price in similar fashion
- Getting responses from DigitalOcean support can be slow and might not be adequate without an additional support plan
September 17, 2019
DigitalOcean - Great pricing with enterprise grade solutions and value
We used DigitalOcean (DO) to support several VMs used in our stack. One VM was used for the Database, another for the Worker, one for the Redis instance, and lastly, we used one for our primary web app. Highly recommend using DO. Super simple to use, it offers plenty of flexibility around snapshots, resizing, and backups too!
- Great upgrade and resizing options
- New monitoring services work very well
- Great pricing
- The DBaaS options are too expensive
September 04, 2019
Super easy to use and incredibly affordable. Sail away with DigitalOcean and be the captain of your voyage!
We have created our own custom scheduling software that allows us to manage various projects and associated information across the various internal departments at the company. While this started as an internal tool our customers requested access. Instead of dealing with maintaining VPN accounts or opening our server to public/anonymous access we chose DigitalOcean to host a public-facing copy of our software strictly for customer use.
- Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
- Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
- Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
- It's hard to think of things they could do differently without losing focus of what they do really well. They nail their promise. However, since I have to think of something I'll say that they could do minor things like give you the option of selecting which ports you want opened and how you want them forwarded internally. You have to manually set these up and it can be tricky if you've never done it before, so they could make these quick options as you configure your droplet before finalizing it.
- Cheaper managed DB pricing - $15/mo isn't bad at all but $5 would be mind-blowingly amazing.
September 04, 2019
DigitalOcean and the evolution of hosting
We happily use DigitalOcean for all of our hosting needs. DigitalOcean provides cloud based servers that are used throughout our organization. In the past we have used various other hosting companies, but DigitalOcean offers us not only a hosting service, but the ability to utilize our own servers. We have been extremely happy with the services DigitalOcean has provided, and any technical problems have been addressed quickly and professionally.
- We have been building websites for over 15 years, and in that time we feel like we have found the perfect host for our needs.
- Technical issues that we have encountered, or problems with setting up website related services have been very quickly and professionally dealt with.
- The customer service is top notch, and surprisingly the customer service representatives have been very enjoyable to talk to.
- Over the last year DigitalOcean has greatly expanded the services they offer.
- Over the years DigitalOcean has grown, and has predicted our needs before we had them.
- There is always room for improvement but I've not had any issues that need resolving or services that need improvement upon.
- I really have no idea what could be improved upon, and when new features are implemented, I am surprised I didn't think of them, They are really on the ball.
August 26, 2019
A great basic virtualization provider
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used DigitalOcean for some of our one-off virtualization workloads and to see the viability of working with one-off POCs and smaller projects. This was primarily for us to test out other offerings out there to see if it stacked up to products we currently use. We did a POC on a WordPress farm for a year and then kept up a couple of instances for posterity purposes.
- Easy to get started
- Good selection of virtual machine images
- Good dashboarding and metrics to show uptime to stakeholders
- Need better increments for virtualization
- Pricing is a bit steep on some offerings
- Can be a challenge to customize out of the box images
January 14, 2019
Super-intuitive, scalable, and affordable!
We use DigitalOcean for all of our cloud computing needs, including cloud instances, managing DNS records, floating IP address, Kubernetes instances, and load balancers. It is directly utilized mainly with engineers and developers and is used in combination with a selection of other SaaS to complete our development environments and backend. We also self-host some other developer tools and marketing tools on our DigitalOcean servers as well.
- Pricing is very straightforward - DigitalOcean uses a simple monthly pricing model (charged per hour), where pricing for instances is structured in clear increments, $5, $10, $20, $40/month, etc...
- Amazing UI - DigitalOcean has a very clear, intuitive UI. It takes mere seconds to create a cloud instance.
- Super scalable - As long as you're not changing a disk/SSD size, all the components of a cloud instance are editable, and seamlessly integrate with other DigitalOcean products like their DNS records manager, load balancers, and floating IPs.
- There is downtime somewhat more often than competing services - DigitalOcean is getting on top of this, but on average, every couple of months, there tends to be server maintenance that can disturb server function.
- Limited products - DigitalOcean only recently introduced their Kubernetes product, which was offered by cloud computing competitors a long time before.
- Limited regions - DigitalOcean has fewer regions, compared to AWS and Google Cloud Platform, but they are quickly scaling and introducing new data centers.
- No GPUs - DigitalOcean does not offer cloud computing instances that have GPUs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
DigitalOcean is used by our engineering team for development, testing and deployment of our production infrastructure. It provides low cost reliable servers, load balancer, storage and most importantly support team.
- Best Support Team
- Low Cost & Reliable
- Booting up a new Droplet takes less than 1 minute
- They are continuously improving and adding new services
- Best documentation for our technical team
- There are lot of other services which are missing. For example, Database Service, CDN, Containers, etc.
I use DigitalOcean for managing both personal and professional websites. I left hosting and domain support from Site5 last year and found DigitalOcean to be the best option for managing my domains. It offers loads of documentation for migration and setup as well as friendly support from their helpdesk team. You'll want to be (or have a member of your team who is) proficient with the terminal as all setup and server settings are managed through the command line.
- Clear and useful documentation for a variety of setups - I've used a variety of their documentation for setting up virtual domains, mail, Apache modules, and SSL. There is an active community helping to keep these documents up to date.
- Priced well and great performance - Their packages start at $5/month and offer many options for a flexible bundle that fits your needs.
- Great help desk - I've submitted three or so tickets to their help desk, and each time they are very responsive and guide me in understanding the solution to my questions.
- No simple email setup - There are a few walkthroughs on setting up the servers, but it most often recommended to use a service like Zoho for a simple email setup. It would be great if DigitalOcean could implement this into their services.
- Must log in to view invoice PDF - It might be ideal for small businesses to receive the PDF file in the monthly billing email. Currently, a user must log in to the system (pass the 2-step authentication if required) and dig around for the PDF in the Billing tab.
March 19, 2017
Dive in! As long as you've got the training and/or team
We use DigitalOcean primarily for a set of applications and automated functionalities. These include client solutions, public applications, and internal development tools. It's primarily used by our programming teams, with some use by other teams in the company.
I also use DigitalOcean for similar personal purposes, including some website hosting as well.
I also use DigitalOcean for similar personal purposes, including some website hosting as well.
- Price Point
- Documentation
- User Interface
- Reliability
- More hands-on support options
- More pre-built server options (eg. pre-installed cPanel images)
- Managed server options
DigitalOcean provides basic "cloud computing" and describes themselves as "bare-bones", which is an understatement when compared to other cloud services, as they only provide computing services (virtual machines), which they call "Droplets", with a few basic sub-services that you can add to your droplets, such as storage, networking, and load-balancing. At this point in telling someone about DigitalOcean, I usually get a question along the lines of "so they are a VPS or a Cloud provider"? DigitalOcean is very clearly in the cloud category. The difference is that a VPS host rents each physical server (individually) to multiple clients, who then share the resources. In Cloud architecture, multiple servers, storage devices, and other network resources are connected together and combined into a single "resource" pool, usually consisting of Processors, RAM, Storage (Hard Drive), Network Adapters, and many more depending on how advanced the service is (GPU, Video RAM, USB Bus, etc). This pool is then shared out as individual units to power "internet" accessible virtual devices, such as servers. The Internet is illustrated in a network diagram as a cloud, hence the name. This architecture has many benefits, such as being available "on the fly", letting a client instantly start, stop, or modify a server. This means a client only pays for what he is using, usually in hourly blocks, which is how DigitalOcean bills. Since all the resources are from a group of servers, a failure of one server or hard drive, NIC, etc does not affect a virtual server at all, meaning any cloud server is considered a "high availability" server. Along with servers, DigitalOcean also offers network services, allowing a client to have a complete private virtual network, with switches, routers, servers, load balancers, subnets, and more, all with the same security advantages as physical units. By offering only 'high-demand' services, DigitalOcean offers awesome cloud services at an affordable rate (starting $5/month), which gives every business, hobbyist, student, and etc access to real network resources, via an easy to use web interface, If they can order a computer from Dell, they can get a cloud server.
- Cloud computing services at amazingly low rates, such as $5 a server per month.
- They have a very clean, simple, an self-explanatory interface. This is the first cloud provider I can honestly truly say this about, Google is second.
- The price per resource is lower than most other providers, while offering the same core compute services. This is especially true, as their storage services are only provided by SSD, which is usually priced at a premium
- The best part is DigitalOcean always has promos going on, and you can manage a server for free if you invite someone monthly or trial other services such as CodeAnywhere.
- The use of cloud in the company description is a bit misleading, it is correctly used, but most people are expecting more cloud services available.
- They take "Bare-Bones" to an extreme, It is currently March 13, 2017, and they JUST added Load Balancing services recently. On the other hand, deploying a private droplet to act as a LB/FO controller, DB, etc., is generally cheaper than what other providers charge for those services.
February 22, 2017
DigitalOcean is awesome
We are using DigitalOcean as the primary host for a number of different small client projects. We had previously tried alternative hosts such as AWS however, they were viewed as over complicated for our use case. Droplet hours are cheaper compared to many of their competitors such as Heroku Dynos.
- Simple UX makes it very easy to use and understand
- Billed hourly so no need to commit to a full month of billing
- Fast provisioning on SSDs
- As of now no DDOS protection functionality
February 20, 2017
DigitalOcean vs. Others: Flexibility
[It's being used] organization-wide. It allows us to have servers in various regions as needed. It offers excellent flexibility in terms of capacity. The ability to spin up a new server with specified storage and memory requirements is amazing and changed how we manage our infrastructure.
The various regions available to DigitalOcean customers is very nice for targeting specific geographical areas. Launching a service for the Asian market? Spin up a server in Indonesia, instead of New York like you'd do for US users.
The various regions available to DigitalOcean customers is very nice for targeting specific geographical areas. Launching a service for the Asian market? Spin up a server in Indonesia, instead of New York like you'd do for US users.
- Various geographical regions to run a VPS in.
- Many pre-built images like WordPress, GitLab, and Ghost.
- Local networking making it easy to communicate between your VPSs.
- Backups that are always on and free would be sweet.
- Better integration with Docker Cloud.
February 14, 2017
Top of the line features for the right price.
For a company I worked with as a consultant, I implemented DigitalOcean as a web server for hosting the main website of the company and a self-hosted JIRA instance where they tracked progress on an internal project. DigitalOcean performed really well during times of high traffic and high use of both the website and the project management tool.
- SPEED! DigitalOcean provides a really good response speed compared to similar providers. Their servers and Drops perform really well when configured the right way.
- Ease of Use. Even for a seasoned developer like me, DigitalOcean seemed a bit intimidating at first due to its need to configure almost anything using a console screen. Turns out however, it was very easy to use by using the web interface and following guides on the internet.
- Documentation. DigitalOcean offers one of the best pieces of documentation one can find for a service anywhere. From creating an account to setting up complex configurations and services, they have it very well documented. If you still can't find how to do anything, you can either read guides on the internet or ask for support and someone will point you in the right direction.
- The only area I see room for improvement, if anything, is features on low tiers. They offer several, very afforable plans to be honest. However, some of the features on low price tiers seem too low for modern needs. For example, space on the $10/m or the $20/m plans seem a bit low compared to other providers.
February 14, 2017
A great catch in an ocean of options.
I needed a robust, scalable server setup in a datacenter to power my online businesses. Shared hosting didn't cut it anymore and I found DigitalOcean did a better job of letting me control my hardware. Their API allows for advanced automation options should I choose to implement them down the line.
- Server management dashboard
- Community support
- Infrastructure as a service
- More automation options
February 14, 2017
DigitalOcean: a direct path to shipping your software product
We use digitalocean as a way to prototype infrastructure code in a way that is fundamentally different from Amazon Web Services. DigitalOcean's product features are more minimal and thus let us be sure we aren't relying on proprietary or non-standard features of AWS. In the past, I've deployed personal projects to DigitalOcean. And at a previous employer, we used DigitalOcean as our primary deployment target.
- A simple feature set that is easy to get started with.
- Plenty of integrations with userland tools such as CLIs, configuration management, and infrastructure as code.
- Offers a clear pricing model that is easy to reason about. Other providers are less clear with how pricing will work in practice.
- Their community outreach is fantastic including a wealth of tutorials and articles.
- One-click installers for popular technologies are a really easy way to test out interesting technologies.
- Their feature set is more focused than other providers like AWS, GCE, or Azure.
- They charge a relatively high amount for image backups.
- In years past, I've noticed droplets getting into a stuck state periodically. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is today.
- Lack of software defined networking is a big minus. Once you are used to providers which offer this, it is tough to go back.
February 14, 2017
If you can configure a server this is the right choice.
DigitalOcean is being used for a handful of client websites, internally and for temporary development/sandbox/staging environments. The selection of locations, ease of setup and speed of provisioning a new server (Droplet) for use is huge-- I can typically have a LAMP server with full root access up and running within 15-30 minutes. Reliability and speed are excellent as well. I really have nothing negative to say about Digital Ocean.
- The user interface is simple, streamlined and easy to use
- Servers (Droplets) take only minutes to set up. The time from creation to fully configured is about as good as it gets.
- Reliablity. Uptime is great, never an issue.
- Cost. They have several, quite reasonable, price points to support small to large websites.
- Analytics. More detailed insight into how a server or site is performing would be nice to have.
- Provisioning profiles. It would be great to be able to define a server entirely before creating it. For example, choose the specific version of Linux, Apache version, MySQL version, PHP, software firewall, and misc Apache, MySQL and PHP extensions, choose users and password and run the install.
February 14, 2017
DigitalOcean made it easy to enable automation
We used DigitalOcean because we could easily segment client websites onto their own servers and scale each one according to traffic. This enabled us to fully adopt automation. Each server was created identically and we could be sure that we got the same result after each build. We also enabled DigitalOcean's backup services on all our servers as an extra layer of backup for our services.
- Price
- Speed
- Support
- Sometimes, droplets were migrated to other hosts that caused a short amount of downtime.
- Enabling backups on exisiting droplets was a bit of a pain, but they fixed that.
- All one click install apps are built on Ubuntu.
February 13, 2017
Bobbing along on a DigitalOcean
We use a DigitalOcean droplet to host our own websites and to host the sites we develop for clients.
- Excellent custom service
- An intuitive control panel
- Fast SSD drivies
- Excellent, competitive pricing
- The sites could be a bit faster -- Linode seems to be leading them at this time.
February 13, 2017
Digital Ocean offers the best VPS, at the lowest prices.
We use DigitalOcean to host a variety of different web products, which we build for clients. It's used by essentially our whole team, and solves the problem of allowing easy to access, quick set up VPS availability. Before DigitalOcean, we were primarily using Heroku and other cloud container services. This hosting strategy got expensive, and offered less powerful resources than DigitalOcean.
Once we moved, we were able to drop hosting bills for a couple of clients from ~$500+/month, to ~$20-30/month. We also had the flexibility and power of having a full Linux VPS, which was more customizable and could be fine tuned to customer needs better.
Once we moved, we were able to drop hosting bills for a couple of clients from ~$500+/month, to ~$20-30/month. We also had the flexibility and power of having a full Linux VPS, which was more customizable and could be fine tuned to customer needs better.
- It's fast. Getting a VPS up and running for the first time takes only a few minutes.
- It's affordable. You get SSD powered boxes for as little as $5/month.
- Their support and educational resources are unmatched. They have the best tutorials and guides in the industry.
- As the product becomes more complex, setup becomes a bit less clear and you need to understand all of the options available to you.
- There are some constraints on hard drive space, RAM, and server location, that once set for the first time, are hard to change later. This should be more clear, or more flexibility should be given.
- Unless this has changed recently, there are no team accounts. A single user/password is used for the account. It would be nice to delegate some instances to team members, who would have their own login credentials. So projects could be shared more easily.