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Great for the little guy (like me!)
April 01, 2016

Great for the little guy (like me!)

Creede Lambard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean

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.
  • Since I don't use DigitalOcean for business purposes at the moment, this doesn't apply. But as an IT professional using it for personal projects and as a testbed for learning, it works great.
  • AWS
As I said earlier, for the kinds of things I do I find a $20/mo DigitalOcean droplet to be much more cost-effective than a similar AWS platform. However, for enterprise-level work with things like CDNs and load balancing, I'd be more inclined to evaluate and use AWS.
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.

DigitalOcean Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
10.0
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
Not Rated
Elastic load balancing
Not Rated
Pre-configured templates
Not Rated
Monitoring tools
Not Rated
Pre-defined machine images
10
Operating system support
10
Security controls
10

Using DigitalOcean

1 - Everything, since it's just me :)
1 - In my use case (Ubuntu Linux) you need a good knowledge of Linux in order to install, create and maintain software. Fortunately DigitalOcean makes it easy to do, both with tools related to the OS (e.g. Ubuntu repositories) and tutorials and how-tos I've mentioned elsewhere.
  • Database, both SQL (MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis)
  • Email (Postfix)
  • Website (primarily Rails and Nginx)
  • I run a politically themed URL shortener. DigitalOcean allows me to do this fairly easily with Rails, Redis and MySQL.
  • When Docker burst upon the scene I used my DigitalOcean droplet to learn how it works. Now all of my services run in Docker containers and it makes updating and maintenance easier.
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!

DigitalOcean Support

Nobody's perfect. :) But the one or two issues I've run into with DigitalOcean were resolved quickly, and I have to give a shout out to their awesome tutorials. When I've wanted to implement a new feature or find out how something works, I've often been able to find a DigitalOcean tutorial that walks me through it.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
None
No - Don't really need it. I'm used to doing my own support.
Yes - Yes it was. Support was able to pinpoint the issue and help me get it fixed quickly.
Just providing their awesome collection of tutorials and how-tos is exceptional in my book. :)

Using DigitalOcean

Because everything I've ever wanted to do with DigitalOcean, I've been able to do with no problem.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Spinning up a machine
  • Updating via apt
  • Support through tutorials and how-tos
  • Can't think of any!
Yes, but I don't use it