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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 …
Starting at $5 Starting Price Per Month
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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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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%
Pricing
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
Product Demos
Demo: Deploying Librarian to DigitalOcean's App Platform in 3 minutes
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Hands on with Redis Labs and DigitalOcean
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MICROWEBER TUTORIAL + DEMO + INSTALL + REVIEW
YouTube
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
DigitalOcean Video
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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(128)
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!
- 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
(1-4 of 4)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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
87.5%
8.8
- DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
- DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
- We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS OpsWorks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price point when compared with AWS or GCP. We've used all four services at my company so it wasn't a case of selecting DigitalOcean over the others. It currently serves a valuable niche in that it provides cheap configurable microservices. Had it been a little more mature when our company started I feel we likely would have selected DigitalOcean for our core app as well instead of AWS OpsWorks.
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.
70%
7.0
- They let me offer my clients a better, fully private hosting option, at a fraction of the price, compared to the budget shared hosting plan they currently have.
- It is easy to use, with a clean interface, making services quick and useful.
- Everything takes less time to setup, you can even add SSH keys via the web interface, rather than generating and adding them vie a SSH shell. Less time equals more profit for me, and smaller bills for my clients.
Compared service to service, Digitalocean comes out on top usually, for smaller better spec servers. This is what they do, and specialty shops are always the best route, with no exception here. However, if you need more than a server, or are not comfortable doing more than starting up a Linux pre-installed image, then it isn't for you. Digitalocean can be VERY powerful in the hands of a very good Linux geek, because even though all they offer are servers and networking tools, that is all a physical network usually has, meaning you can make your own system, and pay a LOT less than with any other service, but if you need more, and don't have those skills, you just won't find it. I do tend to pass up Digitalocean at times when I think I MIGHT need an independent managed database and etc., so it is something you need to take into consideration. As I have said in most of my reviews, this a great place to get info from people that use the service, but EVERY project has a good way, a bad way, and an AWESOME way of doing things, and you need to design an compare and chose the right mix of services to make it work the AWESOME way. I really can not say if DigtalOcean is for you, but if they do match your required services, I say to go for it.
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.
33.75%
3.4
- It came out as an affordable and reliable option for the company I worked with and the needs they had.
- Comparing features and price, DigitalOcean offers a really good mix you cannot find with other providers.
- Plans and features can scale with your company needs.
AWS: Too complex to set things up. Period.
Mediatemple: Great features, services and customer service. Prices are a bit high for what they offer.
Linode: Outstanding features and customer support. Difficult to start with for novice users.
inMotion Hosting: Used to be a really good provider but everything is on a down with them: poor scalability, frequent failures, poor customer support.
Mediatemple: Great features, services and customer service. Prices are a bit high for what they offer.
Linode: Outstanding features and customer support. Difficult to start with for novice users.
inMotion Hosting: Used to be a really good provider but everything is on a down with them: poor scalability, frequent failures, poor customer support.
3
Web designers, web developers, project managers, IT managers
1
Linux Certified Systems Administrator and DevOps Engineer
- Web hosting of company website
- Web hosting for project management application
- Found none so far, we used it for very straightforward, common uses.
- File hosting
- Testing environment
Yes
InMotionHosting. They are offering a poor set of services and customer support service. Their prices and features do not scale well.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Third-party Reviews
I compared DigitalOcean with other services and providers and price vs. features played a major role here. Many other providers offered similar features at a much higher price.
I also looked for reviews online and found almost no complaints on DigitalOcean, satisfaction was the key concept amongst clients of DigitalOcean.
I also looked for reviews online and found almost no complaints on DigitalOcean, satisfaction was the key concept amongst clients of DigitalOcean.
Would not change a thing to be honest, awesome experience so far.
- Creating drops
- Starting servers up
- Installing services
- Not a difficulty in DigitalOcean itself but in some services: if you don't know how to put things together in Linux, you have to read a lot.
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.
90%
9.0
- It's helped drop hosting cost for clients, which has made our customers very happy with us.
- It now takes minutes to set up a developer instance. Our devs can spend less time on set up, and more time programming.
- Cost is so affordable, that we can easily test or try products at very low cost risk.
DigitalOcean easily has the most flexibility, best pricing, and best ease of use, of the competitors we had used. Rackspace offers better engineer access and support, but this comes at a very significant cost. Heroku offers a cloud container system, which has less maintenance, but is much much more expensive for the same specifications. Linode offers mostly the same solution, but still at higher costs.