Overview
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.
One of the best dedicated server platforms!
DigitalOcean for the win
Why DigitalOcean Dominates the VPS Market
Developer-friendly cloud provider
If DigitalOcean is good enough for Beyonce it's good enough for you.
DigitalOcean, great community, great features and startup friendly
DigitalOcean - Great pricing with enterprise grade solutions and value
Super easy to use and incredibly affordable. Sail away with DigitalOcean and be the captain of your voyage!
DigitalOcean and the evolution of hosting
A great basic virtualization provider
Super-intuitive, scalable, and affordable!
DigitalOcean is the answer to the reliable and low-cost Cloud Providers.
Flexible hosting with great customer service and documentation
Dive in! As long as you've got the training and/or team
Popular Features
- Pre-defined machine images (29)8.787%
- Dynamic scaling (28)8.282%
- Monitoring tools (30)7.777%
- Operating system support (29)7.777%
Video Reviews
Leaving a video review helps other professionals like you evaluate products. Be the first one in your network to record a review of DigitalOcean, and make your voice heard!
Pricing
1GB-16GB
$5.00
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Product Demos
Demo: Deploying Librarian to DigitalOcean's App Platform in 3 minutes
Hands on with Redis Labs and DigitalOcean
MICROWEBER TUTORIAL + DEMO + INSTALL + REVIEW
DigitalOcean Swimmer Demo
Features
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet
- 9Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime(26) Ratings
The service uptime as a percentage defined in the SLA
- 8.2Dynamic scaling(28) Ratings
Ease of scaling up or down in response to customer needs
- 7.2Elastic load balancing(20) Ratings
Automatic balancing and distribution of resources across multiple virtual computers
- 9.3Pre-configured templates(25) Ratings
Pre-defined templates for virtual machines
- 7.7Monitoring tools(30) Ratings
Monitoring tools provide alerts when problems are detected
- 8.7Pre-defined machine images(29) Ratings
Range of different server configurations available
- 7.7Operating system support(29) Ratings
Range of operating systems available as pre-configured images
- 7.7Security controls(28) Ratings
Compliance with security protocols like SSL and AES
- 8Automation(2) Ratings
Automation of administrative tasks
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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
DigitalOcean Video
DigitalOcean Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(125)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 31)Best Affordable and Inexpensive Virtual Servers
- 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.
One of the best dedicated server platforms!
- 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
DigitalOcean for the win
- Prices
- Easy to use
- UI
- IAM needs improvements
- CDN
Why DigitalOcean Dominates the VPS Market
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.
Developer-friendly cloud provider
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.
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody looking for enterprise-level solutions or trying to host proprietary software on the platform.
Big projects that require Global availability and replication may fall short in available regions as well.
Also, projects looking to use modern/advanced technologies, like AI, ML, Big Data, will not find packaged solutions like other cloud providers offer.
- 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.
- 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
- I would recommend DigitalOcean for any startup looking to get up and running quickly, but concerned about scalability and infrastructure costs
- DigitalOcean is also a powerful tool for running microservices; it can be useful for prototyping or quickly launching pre-configured services
Scenarios where DigitalOcean is less appropriate:
- DigitalOcean would be less appropriate for companies with limited devops experience in their teams (you need to be more on top of your infrastructure and may not get the automated infrastructure updates that you would from something like AWS).
DigitalOcean - Great pricing with enterprise grade solutions and value
- Great upgrade and resizing options
- New monitoring services work very well
- Great pricing
- The DBaaS options are too expensive
Super easy to use and incredibly affordable. Sail away with DigitalOcean and be the captain of your voyage!
- 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.
DigitalOcean and the evolution of hosting
- 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.
A great basic virtualization provider
- 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
Super-intuitive, scalable, and affordable!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Dive in! As long as you've got the training and/or team
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
- 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.
DigitalOcean is awesome
- 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
- Prototyping and MVP demos due to its simplicity and ease of use
- Fast cloud server provisioning allows you to quickly spin up new instances
- Cheap servers billed hourly allows you to scale up and down to match server load and maintain availability
- No DDOS protection which would be a nice feature to have
DigitalOcean vs. Others: Flexibility
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.
Top of the line features for the right price.
- 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.
A great catch in an ocean of options.
- Server management dashboard
- Community support
- Infrastructure as a service
- More automation options
DigitalOcean: a direct path to shipping your software product
- 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.
I would avoid DigitalOcean if you don't need a full-blown IaaS and can use something like Heroku to get your app out the door quickly. I would also use a more advanced provider like AWS if you need features beyond DigitalOcean's catalog.
If you can configure a server this is the right choice.
- 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.
DigitalOcean made it easy to enable automation
- 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.
Bobbing along on a DigitalOcean
- 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.
Digital Ocean offers the best VPS, at the lowest prices.
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.