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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

Premium Droplets by DigitalOcean

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

(127)

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

(1-21 of 21)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Marco Carnevali | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
DigitalOcean is suitable if you'd like to have a scalable server for cheaper prices than the competition and with a quick and easy setup process. If you otherwise prefer a server [that] is highly [customizable] then it's not suitable for you.
Praneeth Karnena | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
DigitalOcean is best suited for SMBs. For large enterprises, it's better to go for premium providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The reason being very simple, they don't offer products that other providers do offer. Products like Content Delivery Network, Web Application Firewalls, Scalable Databases, Infrastructure for running intensive applications like Machine Learning and Virtual Reality or so.
Leonel Quinteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
For single developers/small agencies, quick prototypes or open source-based architectures, Digital Ocean is a great choice. They make it simple to start any project quickly without being afraid of hidden costs.

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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Scenarios where DigitalOcean is well suited:
- 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).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Great pricing, tons of regions, just an all around perfect solution for startups and larger software companies.
Brandon Mullins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We at Moon Books use Wordpress as our CMS of choice. DigitalOcean works amazingly well with Wordpress and is quicker than any other host I've ever used. We also use EasyEngine in addition to DigitalOcean, which makes rolling out new sites even quicker. The only scenario that I could think of in this case, if possibly using another CMS such as Drupal, but I've not tried it personally, the Drupal hosting could very easily be as polished as Wordpress, I'm just pulling Drupal out of my hat.
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
I would recommend DigitalOcean to a colleague that has started to look around for a virtual hosting provider but doesn't have an enterprise workload. It hits the sweet spot of a middle tier provider for a lot of the use cases that we were looking for from a support perspective.
Fedor Paretsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
DigitalOcean is wonderful for startups that are looking to quickly create a backend, API, or cloud computing infrastructure. Most of the products that DigitalOcean offers makes it really easy to set this up. For companies that require more complex or advanced cloud computing resources, like Computer Vision, AI, etc... DigitalOcean doesn't offer these specific services, so a different cloud computing service may be better suited for this purpose.
Tarun Mangukiya | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
In case of SaaS product, your cloud infrastructure is one of the most costly aspect. Thus having low cost of infrastructure allows us to provide high quality services at reasonable rates to our users. Along with it, it must be reliable enough that we can push our production data there. DigitalOcean is best suited for these scenarios. They provides reliable cloud services at reasonable pricing point. Plus they do have free support team, who guide and advise us starting from getting used to the platform to deciding the infrastructure for our production. The only pain point is that, they do have less number of services. But, they are adding them on monthly basis.
Craig Nash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Digitalocean is perfect for any person or business on a budget, from students to start-ups, DigitalOcean is very affordable, literally at $5 a month, while offering very high-quality services that, while VERY limited, outrank the other cloud providers, in my opinion. Personally, I find DigitalOcean to be the perfect match for 75% of my clients, who have websites and other online services currently through budget hosting providers, like GoDaddy, but really want higher security, control, bandwidth and etc., without increasing the bill. Normally, that would be impossible but is EXACTLY what is offered by DigitalOcean. You literally have nothing to lose, as you can easily swing multiple servers for free by using a promo service every few months. Yes, AWS does also offer a tier of basic services for a year, and they can't compare to DigitalOcean.
February 22, 2017

DigitalOcean is awesome

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Well Suited:
  • 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
Not Well Suited:
  • No DDOS protection which would be a nice feature to have
Tyler Longren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[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.
  • 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.
You need to be flexible in your server infrastructure. If you're not sure what you need, DigitalOcean is a great option. If your needs change rapidly, DigitalOcean is a great option. Less appropriate if you need to have physical control over servers, DigitalOcean is not a colocation facility and simply provides virtual servers on their hardware.
Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
DigitalOcean is a very good option for dedicated hosting of applications and sites with high traffic or high use volume. It's not as good of an option for small websites or novice users looking for a cheap hosting.
Chris Gabriel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Love the speed in which one can spin up a fresh machine, it literally takes only a few seconds. Why bother with virtual machines when you can just as easily do it in the cloud? The community is particularly responsive and helpful. I really like the improvement they've made to their administrative dashboard. While the selection of OS images is pretty good, their one-click apps are awesome though I haven't used them in production yet.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
When you need to get something deployed quickly, DigitalOcean can be one of the fastest routes if you can't use a PaaS and have requirements that necessitate a VPS.

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.
Cameron Banga | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
It's great for startups that want a no-nonsense, simple solution. It's also great for young developers just getting started, as a good amount of value is provided at very little cost. Their flexibility, availability, and different pricing tiers also make Digital Ocean a great product for development teams of all size, as they can handle nearly any scale necessary.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used DigitalOcean for business and personal use, the pricing is very flexible to meet the needs of both.

DigitalOcean is a great provider for virtual private server (VPS) web hosting for people who don't want to have to micromanage each and every minor step that is usually involved with setting up Linux-based web servers. DigitalOcean solves that issue with one click solutions that set up servers for you. This includes but isn't limited to WordPress, Ubuntu, and Fedora including custom ISOs.
  • Pricing is very affordable and scalable
  • Uptime is very dependable and consistant
  • Easy to set up, well documented FAQ and tutorials
  • I would like to see increased speeds against VPS providers such as Vultr
  • Expand the one click setup scripts
  • Certain resources could be increased to match the competition like Linode's basic offering
DigitalOcean is a VPS solution I would highly suggest to anyone that is starting out in VPS. It is very simple and easy to use as a beginner. DigitalOcean is also useful for web admins that are more comfortable and advanced working in a remote console/Linux environment. The documentation they have is very extensive.
August 01, 2016

DigitalOcean

Tom Thomas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's a good cloud server for a decent price compared to its competitors. The interface is easy to use and allows you to host your own site without having to put in as much work. The features and value were great but their support lacked effectiveness and left a lot to be desired.
  • Easy to use
  • Fast, even compared to other cloud hosting sites
  • Great price
  • Support is not always top notch
It is a great VPS. It has very great speed capabilities and rarely goes down. It can however be difficult to get support from them, as their communication is limited to basically just messaging. They often take a long time to respond and the responses aren't necessarily very helpful or even useful.
June 24, 2016

Great cloud server

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use a team account to access the servers we use. It is well priced and the support is amazing.
  • Great support
  • Good pricing, very fair
  • Very stable
  • A little difficult to figure out if you're a beginner.
It is a great site to host a VPS on a budget.
Creede Lambard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use DigitalOcean as a platform for my personal website, to manage email for several domains I administer, and for some personal projects related to my hobbies and interests.
  • Uptime. Since I joined a couple of years ago I don't think I've had a single outage.
  • Native IPv6. IPv6 is the way of the future and DigitalOcean allows me to participate without jumping through hoops (e.g. negotiating through a tunnel broker).
  • Simplicity. I can spin up a droplet and have it up and running quickly, and I don't have to go through a lengthy process to do so.
  • Platform. I love Ubuntu and it's standard with DigitalOcean.
  • External storage. This is the big one. When you spin up a droplet you have a fixed virtual disk size. It would be really nice to be able to temporarily or permanently add storage without resorting to hacks involving solutions like S3 or Dropbox.
  • DNS management. There are numerous DNS solutions available on the net but it would be nice to have one native to DigitalOcean.
I would recommend DigitalOcean to the small-scale operator who just wants to put up a Wordpress site or something similar; to the hobbyist learning about cloud computing; and to someone looking for a platform more powerful than shared hosting, less expensive than a dedicated host and more cost-effective than AWS. For example, until I found DigitalOcean I was making do with a t1.micro AWS instance that was costing about $15 a month when things like bandwidth costs were factored in. My DigitalOcean droplet runs about $20 a month, has much more computing power than the old AWS instance, and is chugging along happily running several Docker containers that house the services I use. However, for those who need a full ecosystem of products like CDNs, in-house DNS, dedicated database solutions and the like, or who are running larger-scale operations, something like AWS would be more appropriate.
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