DigitalOcean Pricing Overview

DigitalOcean is an easy option at an affordable price, compared to most of it's competitors, Digital Ocean offers some really low prices and no surprise costs which make it really easy to trust. Their specifications are fair and it's easy to launch a Droplet or other server type anywhere in their range of regions. The company offer a variety of different server types as well as other services which means you have a lot of versatility with the platform to run multiple different parts of your business on one cloud system. There are also free options for products such as Functions, which while limited are still generous and useful for specific use cases.

The platform offered by DigitalOcean lacks the depth that certain other Platforms such as AWS contains. DigitalOcean lock port 25 on Droplets making it impossible to use for email without an external SMTP relay. DigitalOcean also do not offer an SMTP relay of their own, making it necessary to look elsewhere for such a tool if you plan to use the server for email hosting - as someone managing a web server this is disappointing, but not a dealbreaker.

As a web development business we host our clients' websites to close the room for confusion that this entails for someone unexperienced in the industry. No small business owner out there selling their product needs a second 9 to 5 to manage their website. We were finding that any host we tried to use to host our client's sites was costing a lot of money and we needed to change this, so we opted to setup our own servers using DigitalOcean to make a cost-effective way to manage our clients' websites. DigitalOcean costs us a fraction of the cost to get all of our client's sites online as well as our own, meaning we don't have to charge as much, and we have full control of what's going on!

Although DigitalOcean offers various cloud computing services, we only use its Premium AMD Droplets to host development and production websites. When used with a cloud server management control panel, such as RunCloud or GridPane, it is straightforward to provision a new server on DigitalOcean. Through RunCloud's graphical user interface, we typically provision a DigitalOcean server via RunCloud's "Direct Server Provisioning" method, which takes less than 10 minutes. This method requires us to generate a personal access token in the DigitalOcean control panel, after which all server management tasks, e.g., provisioning, monitoring, maintenance, and security, can be handled through RunCloud. Further, our RunCloud Pro plan makes it easy for us to deploy websites, create and restore backups, and clone websites to another server. Our websites hosted on the Premium AMD Droplets (NYC3 and SGP1 data centers) have shown excellent page load time and uptime performance. In our testing, page load time and Core Web Vitals of our sites hosted on these DO Droplets (with an OLS server on RunCloud) are consistently better than other options, including Cloudways and shared hosting. Since we started using DigitalOcean Droplets about six months ago, none of our websites have suffered any downtime. Even after increasing the prices of its Droplets on July 1, 2022, we believe DigitalOcean offers good value and remains our preferred cloud hosting provider. We have found DO's pricing transparent and predictable, as advertised.

Digital Ocean per se does not provide an OpenLiteSpeed-based web hosting control panel. It is possible to install CyberPanel (which is free and comes with OpenLiteSpeed) on DigitalOcean, but we prefer RunCloud's graphical interface to CyberPanel's. Furthermore, while testing CyberPanel, we found a recurring issue with installing SSL certificates.

DigitalOcean helps us to overcome the problem of cost-effectiveness. Even with the added cost of a RunCloud Pro plan, the price of two DO's Premium AMD Droplets is still lower than what we paid for hosting our 8-10 websites on other platforms (e.g., WordPress hosting). In this way, we have realized cost savings without sacrificing website performance.

1. Easy to start - You can start a DigitalOcean (DO) VPS, at any time with very little knowledge about system configuration and tear them down when not needed. The default options are very good, but you still have some control over choosing Unix-based OS and also memory and HDD space. If AWS seems confusing to you, welcome to simple choices. Boot time is also less than a minute. 2. Hourly pricing with monthly cap - Price for each machine is calculated hourly and the basic machines are dirt cheap. But wait for the best part - they instantly show the maximum monthly charges for every plan, which is about 25 days of hourly rate and it starts at $5/mo for a 20GB SSD VPS. 3. Very extensive tutorials - DigitalOcean (DO) is very welcoming and helpful to newbie users who might never have owned/maintained a VPS earlier. Its documentation is very extensive, right from securing your server with ssh to installing Wordpress to running your own mail servers. A lot of articles are written by the community in a detailed step-by-step manner and frankly, I use them a lot even while setting up something on my local machine. This is DigitalOcean's most prized IP, I would say - everyone offers low-cost VPS, but who cares to educate the buyer so that they can utilize the potential of those machines? 4. Control stuff from admin panel - This is also something designed for new users, where you can extensively control your machine like boot, shutdown, destroy, see usage statistics, create backup/snapshots, reset password with few clicks. For eg. if you feel you have misconfigured the system beyond something you can fix, you can just "Power cycle" it, which would effectively flush everything and re-install the OS to give a fresh start. 5. Online Shell - The standard way to interact with your remote linux box is through SSH but setting it up is too much for simple tasks. So, they provide a online shell for every machine so that you can have a web-based shell which works just like SSH from local machine. It is incredibly useful when you just want to tweak simple things while not at home. 6. Snapshot - You can take snapshot of the whole machine after shutting it down, destroy the machine and resume from the snapshot later like nothing happened. This also helps you make some boilerplate changes, from where you can create new machines (although cloud-init is more suited for this use-case).

1. No user-provided system ISO - Although you can choose from some Linux flavours while creating a machine, you cant provide ISO for some other flavour which is not in their list. 2. Pay while off - Even while your machine is in shutdown state, you are paying for it, as they clarify that your resources are still allotted for you exclusively. Only way is to destroy the machine, meaning you cant bootup that machine with previous data. 3. Slow to resume Snapshots - Snapshots are nice, but because they archive the whole HDD it takes about 5 minutes to re-create machines from snapshots even for small machines. 4. Can crash/fail - While not that frequent, reports of DigitalOcean (DO) machines crashing due to hard disk failures have been reported sometimes on the internet. This is "not unlike" AWS or every other provider and you should backup your important stuff in some non-DO services for reliability. 5. Low HDD space because of SSD - Since DO switched to SSDs instead of normal Hard Disks, disk capacity of lower-end plans have been cut drastically, and you cant add just more disk space for a small price - only way is to switch to higher-end plans with more of everything. 6. Requires Card even for trial - DO provides $10 credit for new users, but you cant activate your account without Credit Cards. This is again nothing unheard of, but a bit of a downer for new users.

I am hosting my private OwnCloud service on DO machines. Also at day job, we use it as deployment machine for some financial services. DO VPS machines cost as low as shared machines, but packs quite good performance with great network speed and bandwidth. It has been useful for offloading some task from local dev machines to a common DO machine.

1. Price prediction - you buy a Virtual Machine for 20$/month and you know exactly how much you will be charged. It's much better than Amazon Web Services where it's impossible to predict. 2. Very convenient service for Kubernetes clusters. It works "out-of-the-box" and it is much more convenient than google developer console. 3. Ability to recover access to the virtual machine even if you lost your security key (which is not the option in AWS) 4. Ability to turn on a back up for 20% of your virtual machine price 5. Possibility to split virtual machines by projects 6. Digital Ocean virtual machine is very powerful, so for such a price you get the best value - you can host up to 3 websites on one $5/month machine 7. Very simple, smart and user friendly interface to work, so learning time cost is almost zero 8. Possibility to connect via web platform and feel almost no difference to SSH connection. 9. Digital Ocean has a lot of pre-built images for most of popular developer needs. 10. All disks are SSD and time to set the virtual machine up is less than 1 minute

Hard to find..., but their authentication process is not perfect. If you logged in with google profile - you have a trouble to sign-in and have to go over several google authentication. Another disadvantage is that it's not "one-window" service for all you digital needs. It does not have possibility to buy domain

I found the best cloud service provider and host our company's websites exclusively on Digital Ocean. The main benefit is controlling the budget in a simple way. Very fast possibility to start virtual machine.

Ease of Use: DigitalOcean provides a user-friendly interface and intuitive tools, making it easy for developers to deploy, manage, and scale their applications and infrastructure. Developer-Focused Features: DigitalOcean offers a range of developer-friendly features, such as pre-configured droplets (virtual machines), one-click application deployments, and extensive documentation, enabling developers to quickly get started with their projects. Scalability: DigitalOcean allows users to easily scale their infrastructure as their needs grow. They provide flexible options to resize droplets, add more resources, or leverage load balancers to handle increased traffic. Cost-Effective: DigitalOcean offers competitive pricing and transparent billing. They provide various pricing plans to suit different project requirements, and their pricing structure is straightforward, allowing users to estimate and control their costs effectively. Community and Support: DigitalOcean has a vibrant community of developers and a vast collection of tutorials, articles, and Q&A resources. Additionally, they provide reliable support services to assist users with any technical issues or inquiries they may have.

Limited Service Offerings: DigitalOcean focuses primarily on providing cloud infrastructure services, such as virtual machines (droplets), storage, and networking. While they offer additional services like managed databases and load balancers, their service portfolio may be less extensive compared to some larger cloud providers. Geographical Availability: DigitalOcean has data centers in specific regions, which may limit the options for deploying infrastructure in certain geographic locations. Support Response Times: While DigitalOcean provides support services, Sometimes there are longer response times for support tickets during peak periods.

Making droplets and market place ready bundled applications easily accessible and deployable.

Pricing, you simply can not beat the pricing of digitalocean for every size. Starting from $5 per month for 512MB RAM and 20GB of storage, it is insanely cheap. Even scaling up the prices are reasonable. We liked DO for many reasons, some of them are a. SSDs, whichever size we chose, super fast disk IO b. Gigabit LAN, with generous per month total limit on transfer c. Dedicated static ip d. Can create snapshots of a machine to restore from later e. One click apps with some of the most popular services available right out of box f. SSH/ webconsole access g. Vanilla distributions that can be configured any way we liked h. Can configure it to notify if/when we are going over a certain configurable limit

Something I missed was uploading a custom image to create a server from. Apart from that, firewall would have been great, but thats nitpicking.

Previously we used openshift to run our custom, in house servers but quickly ran into a wall when not using any of their pre-built configurations. We needed root, and realized the need for a VPS. Decided upon DO after comparing the cost (when do we not) and never looked back. Right now we have a few for a database, a nodejs server and then some.

For me, the value that I receive is very good. The pricing is clearly stated so I have never had to contend with surprise changes. The server has been reliable. Notices of any maintenance related outages are clearly shared ahead of time. In the end, I don't have to worry about surprises.

I have not experienced anything that I do not like about Digital Ocean. For me, I get what I expect and have not had to report many issues. When I have, I can count on a quick reply.

I run a business web application that helps to run our business. As a non-profit, reliability and price are important to me. I feel that Digital Ocean gives me good value for my money and a service that I can count on.

Simple and friendly UI for managing servers and prebuilt images for various development stacks. HDDs are SSDs which means the images run very quickly. I love their referrer program! You can earn up to 25$ from a referee and there is no limit to the amount of credit you can earn through referrals! Their pricing model is fantastic for Beginners and Startups. Bandwidth is excellent and fast! One-click Apps and Snapshots features are great for beginners to try out different services. Their community documentations are so rich that it is easy to find the right solution for server guidelines.

Though their pricing model is reasonable, however instead of some fixed pricing model, they should allow users to customize server RAM, CPU, Bandwidth, HDD and charge them accordingly. If you stop your server they will still charge you, unless you take a snapshot of it and then destroy it. Limited Bandwidth should be increased for lower priced plans.

I am developing web applications in my professional life. Sometimes we need to test our applications before going production. For testing web applications we are using DigitalOcean 5$ plan, which saves lots of money. Then for production web applications we use DigitalOcean's bigger plans based on applications size