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DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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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Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Pre-defined machine images (29)
    8.7
    87%
  • Dynamic scaling (28)
    8.2
    82%
  • Monitoring tools (30)
    7.7
    77%
  • Operating system support (29)
    7.7
    77%
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Pricing

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1GB-16GB

$5.00

Cloud
Starting Price Per Month

8GB-160GB

$60.00

Cloud
Starting Price Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Demo: Deploying Librarian to DigitalOcean's App Platform in 3 minutes

YouTube

Hands on with Redis Labs and DigitalOcean

YouTube

MICROWEBER TUTORIAL + DEMO + INSTALL + REVIEW

YouTube

DigitalOcean Swimmer Demo

YouTube
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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

8.2
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

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

Introducing Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean. Starting at just $6/month, you can choose some of the latest Intel and AMD processors around. Backed by NVMe drives, Premium Droplets are perfect for high-traffic applications that require peak performance at a minimal price. To l...
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DigitalOcean Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(132)

Community Insights

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!

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

(1-25 of 31)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Praneeth Karnena | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Leonel Quinteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Chris Widner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Brandon Mullins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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
Fedor Paretsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Tarun Mangukiya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Jeanine Schoessler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Craig Nash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Tyler Longren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Joey Yax | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Edward Larkey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Cameron Banga | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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