DigitalOcean, great community, great features and startup friendly
October 16, 2019
DigitalOcean, great community, great features and startup friendly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with DigitalOcean
We've used DigitalOcean for running microservices. It's only used by our development team and isn't often used by other departments. It isn't our primary hosting service (we use AWS/Heroku) but I've used it both at work and on personal projects to quickly and cheaply launch prototypes. DigitalOcean is better for people who are a little more technical but it has some nice templated hosting solutions (e.g. WordPress) that less technical members of the team can use.
- DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
- The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
- DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
- DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
- DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials
- Although I've never had issues with droplets, DigitalOcean occasionally has service outages in their deployment services.
- It would be nice if DigitalOcean provided a means to cap egress billing (e.g. lock out an instance that is unintentionally ramping up a large bill)
- I like that DigitalOcean spaces are compatible with S3 but it would be nice if they scaled in terms of space and price in similar fashion
- Getting responses from DigitalOcean support can be slow and might not be adequate without an additional support plan
- DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
- DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
- We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS OpsWorks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price point when compared with AWS or GCP. We've used all four services at my company so it wasn't a case of selecting DigitalOcean over the others. It currently serves a valuable niche in that it provides cheap configurable microservices. Had it been a little more mature when our company started I feel we likely would have selected DigitalOcean for our core app as well instead of AWS OpsWorks.
Do you think DigitalOcean delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with DigitalOcean's feature set?
Yes
Did DigitalOcean live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of DigitalOcean go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy DigitalOcean again?
Yes