Dive into DigitalOcean
June 13, 2016

Dive into DigitalOcean

Robert Allen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean

We use Digital Ocean to spin up servers for most client jobs. DO is one of the easiest web hosting services around and provides fantastic performance with a great price. We host our company website on Digital Ocean and have done so for over a year. Whenever a new WordPress 'stack' needs to be tested, we spin up a Digital Ocean server and are ready to go in just a couple minutes.
  • DigitalOcean is exceedingly easy to use, with one of the best user interfaces I've seen among web hosts.
  • DigitalOcean has some of the best site performance around. Their VPSs are fast, reliable, and virtually never go down.
  • The initial process of spinning up a server requires logging into the server via the console and changing passwords. This is, frankly, an absurd step. The first few times we spun up new servers we struggled with this opaque process.
  • Preventing disk images from being transferred from one server to another is an odd limitation which feels just shy of arbitrary.
  • The ease-of-use of DO enables us to spin up servers in moments, versus UI-nightmares like WP Engine which would take substantially longer. This enables faster start times and captures team momentum. It is also more enjoyable to use than WP Engine, and we can't put a price on not having headaches.
  • DO allows us to spin up servers in a snap, with great performance and a great price. They have the trifecta of quality and have won loyal customers as a result.
DigitalOcean is fast, easy to use, reliable, with few features, and at a great price. WP Engine is clunky, tricky to use, reliable, feature rich, and at a very high price. GoDaddy is clunky, difficult to use, too complex to be reliable, rife with garbage feature 'add-ons', and their price doesn't even matter because of how terrible they are to use. Convenience is king. DigitalOcean is convenient.
DigitalOcean (DO) provides exceptional performance with a very low price. For clients with extremely low budgets, the price matters. That said, DO servers are fairly barebones. We tend to use managed hosting such as WP Engine for clients, and use DO for testing, internal projects, or clients with personal sites for whom the advantages of managed hosting are wasted.

DigitalOcean Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
10
Elastic load balancing
9
Pre-configured templates
9
Monitoring tools
7
Pre-defined machine images
9