Flexible hosting with great customer service and documentation
June 19, 2018
Flexible hosting with great customer service and documentation
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean
I use DigitalOcean for managing both personal and professional websites. I left hosting and domain support from Site5 last year and found DigitalOcean to be the best option for managing my domains. It offers loads of documentation for migration and setup as well as friendly support from their helpdesk team. You'll want to be (or have a member of your team who is) proficient with the terminal as all setup and server settings are managed through the command line.
- Clear and useful documentation for a variety of setups - I've used a variety of their documentation for setting up virtual domains, mail, Apache modules, and SSL. There is an active community helping to keep these documents up to date.
- Priced well and great performance - Their packages start at $5/month and offer many options for a flexible bundle that fits your needs.
- Great help desk - I've submitted three or so tickets to their help desk, and each time they are very responsive and guide me in understanding the solution to my questions.
- No simple email setup - There are a few walkthroughs on setting up the servers, but it most often recommended to use a service like Zoho for a simple email setup. It would be great if DigitalOcean could implement this into their services.
- Must log in to view invoice PDF - It might be ideal for small businesses to receive the PDF file in the monthly billing email. Currently, a user must log in to the system (pass the 2-step authentication if required) and dig around for the PDF in the Billing tab.
- With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt.
- Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5.
- Site5
Site5's customer service and support have declined over the recent years. The last couple of tickets that I submitted in 2016 were never addressed by their help team. The only customer service agent seems to be on their Twitter account. Site5 does not allow any configuration of using free SSL services.