DigitalOcean: a direct path to shipping your software product
February 14, 2017
DigitalOcean: a direct path to shipping your software product
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean
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.
- An excellent API that let us integrate their service tightly into our CI/CD pipeline.
- I've been surprised by high bandwidth charges in the past. Though this particular usage would have bitten me on other providers as well.
- AWS and Heroku
DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with a provider like Linode. AWS and Google Cloud have a much richer catalog but also carry higher overhead and cost. Heroku and other PaaS products provide a nicer experience for people that don't want to deal with server setup.