Cheap and Fast but not necessarily reliable 100% of the time.
February 16, 2017
Cheap and Fast but not necessarily reliable 100% of the time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean
As a freelancer, most of my clients are small businesses and individuals who are looking for something cheap and fast. They cannot afford a VPS service that costs hundreds of dollars. DigitalOcean is probably the cheapest way to set up your web application and it can scale well so you don't really have to worry about infrastructure all that much; of course, Amazon can also provide similar and probably better services but DigitalOcean droplets are comparatively cheaper and have almost all the advantages of using AWS. Also, DigitalOcean has been opening up more server farms around the world hence if you are building an application that is targeted for an audience at a particular place, you could spin up a server that is really close to your target audience; the last time I checked AWS or Linode didn't have as many locations as DigitalOcean. Also, the community documentation is really awesome and there are a lot of small apps and integrations that are coming up that make my work easier.
Pros
- Running a wordpress site at $5 is really cheap (although you need to know a little bit on configuring your server for security).
- Server locations can help applications that target certain locations, you could spin up a server which is very close to your audience hence increasing the speed at which you serve your applications.
- At its core, DigitalOcean provides you with a highly configurable server, so you are only limited by your imagination or rather your skills on how you run your server.
Cons
- Security is a major problem, although things are improving now. Community documentation is helping improve that as well, there are a lot of articles that help in configuring servers to improve security overall.
- Support times are pretty bad, it might be a couple of hours sometimes before someone replies to your ticket. This doesn't happen all the time though.
- As they are growing the quality has downgraded a little, integrations with some apps (in my case Laravel Forge ) had suffered because of this; hopefully they will get their act straight.
- Didn't affect me in any way so far.
- Linode, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services
It was cheap, reliable and very configurable. On top of that, it has a lot of images of popular applications, I don't have to spend hours together getting my applications running. Linode though is very similar to digitalocean but I didn't find its interface as user-friendly as DigitalOcean, hence I switched to DigitalOcean.
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