Item: DigitalOcean
Rating: 10
Author: Edward Larkey

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used DigitalOcean because we could easily segment client websites onto their own servers and scale each one according to traffic. This enabled us to fully adopt automation. Each server was created identically and we could be sure that we got the same result after each build. We also enabled DigitalOcean's backup services on all our servers as an extra layer of backup for our services.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Lowered our cost of hosting.
Clients weren't impacted by traffic to other websites.
Made creating new sites/servers almost instant and repeatable, saving time and money.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Web Services and Linode

It was the right balance of cost, ease of use, and support.

Other Software Used

Amazon Web Services, Ansible, Chef

Likelihood to Recommend

Might be less appropriate in enterprise settings. But you can build a very robust architecture spread across different regions very easily. They might not have load balancing built in, but you can set that up pretty easily if you want to with a third or fourth node. Digitalocean gets out of your way to build what you need to quickly.

DigitalOcean made it easy to enable automation

Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean