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Developer-friendly cloud provider
Updated November 19, 2019

Developer-friendly cloud provider

Leonel Quinteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean

Right now it's used to host the entire infrastructure of a SaaS ERP system. It helps running and to scale the systems with developer-friendly tools and easy-to-understand prices.
We use several Virtual Machines to host our different services from our SOA architecture (Nginx load balancer/API proxy, PostgreSQL DB instance, APIs servers, and Nginx Web Servers) together with some networking services like Private Network and Public Floating IPs.
  • Developer-friendly tools and APIs.
  • Great documentation.
  • Awesome community and support.
  • Good and clean UI for cloud resources management.
  • Nice collection of products which is growing all the time adding new products every year.
  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
  • Costs are easily predicted, so budget estimation is more accurate.
  • The architecture was defined around available products at the time. With new product offerings, we feel forced to migrate to more robust solutions which adds some cost, but also adds reliability to our infrastructure.
  • Documentation and community docs were a great resource to help us build our architecture.
Digital Ocean is easier to start with and was a great choice for that project. On other projects, I may choose Google Cloud products because of their more complex product offerings and advanced features.
Products like Storage or Pub/Sub isn't available on Digital Ocean and the alternative to Cloud SQL wasn't available at the time we created the project, so product availability may be a deciding factor.
Support can be better, especially for any paying customer.
They help a lot, but mostly through information, it's hard to get support taking actions on your architecture. While this isn't something I look for in a provider, it may be a blocker for some users that may need extra help setting up environments.
Answer times aren't the best either, but not sure how that compares to other providers anyway.
For single developers/small agencies, quick prototypes or open source-based architectures, Digital Ocean is a great choice. They make it simple to start any project quickly without being afraid of hidden costs.

I wouldn't recommend it to anybody looking for enterprise-level solutions or trying to host proprietary software on the platform.
Big projects that require Global availability and replication may fall short in available regions as well.
Also, projects looking to use modern/advanced technologies, like AI, ML, Big Data, will not find packaged solutions like other cloud providers offer.

DigitalOcean Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
8.1
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9
Dynamic scaling
7
Elastic load balancing
9
Pre-configured templates
8
Monitoring tools
7
Pre-defined machine images
10
Operating system support
7
Security controls
8

Using DigitalOcean

They are really developer-oriented and that can be seen on their APIs design, documentation, community support, and tools.
Their dashboard is clean and easy to use, not overloaded with action buttons or other unnecessary elements.
The Marketplace is a great way to easily deploy a lot of products.
The community docs provide easy to follow step-by-step instructions for deploying almost anything without being an expert.