DigitalOcean Hosting- Review

DigitalOcean is a cloud computing company. They offer many unmanaged plans for many one-click apps such as WordPress, GitLad, MySQL and many more. DigitalOcean was established 2011 by five co-founders. They are now based in New York and also have an office in Cambridge Massachusetts near Boston. Since 2011 DigitalOcean have now got twelve datacenters all over the world, with customers in 195 countries. That’s every country in the world! Impressive, eh? They are now also proud to boast over one million customers with over 78 million droplets being made since they were established in 2011.  

What is DigitalOcean’s hosting like?

Users are able to build their very own virtual machine (VM) or ‘droplets’, by choosing their own operating system and then eventually whichever one-click app they are using. Users have a wide range of choice between Linux operating systems and the one-click apps. DigitalOcean offers 3 different types of droplets. The three kinds of droplets they offer are called the Standard, Optimised and the Flexible droplet. Each droplet ranges in prices, as they have there own set of plans within each droplet. These droplets basically become your own personal VPS (virtual personal server), working of DigitalOceans servers.  

Does DigitalOcean offer good plans?

DigitalOcean offers a wide range of plans. They can get very confusing sometimes, but they are at a fantastic price. Within the standard droplets, the price can range from $5/£4, all the way up to $960/£768.88 per month. Altogether there are eleven standard droplets, each ranging in different amounts of memory, SSD disk, transfer and vCPU. DigitalOcean says that these droplets are perfect to host blogs, web applications, staging environments, caching and databases. This means these plans would be perfect for the likes of WordPress sites. Away from the standard droplets, they also offer two other kinds of droplets. These droplets are called the optimised droplets and the flexible droplets. The price range of the optimized droplets is from $40/£32.04-$640/£512.59 a month. These plans would be perfect for video encoding, batch processing and CI/CD. The other plans called the flexible droplets all cost the same $15/£12.01 a month. This is to reduce the worrying of the price for their customers as these plans either have more of one feature and less of another. So choosing the right one for you has never been easier.  

Performance! What does DigitalOcean offer?

DigitalOcean has many datacenters around the world, in key areas of the US, Europe and Asia. This means performance should be good as a datacenter should be nearby, wherever you are from. An uptime of 99.99% is offered by DigitalOcean for both their droplets and storage. If uptime goes below the 99.99%, they the customer is refunded to them by an hourly rate.  

What kind of security does DigitalOcean have for their hosting?

DigitalOcean has two types of security. Physical hosting at their sites and infrastructure security for users information and droplets. By having physical staff at every site, it means no one could enter without authorisation, securing all your data from getting into the wrong hands. Also, your own data won’t get lost at these sites, as the data centres are backed up with generators. Only certain employee’s have access to your data. The employees that have these permissions are selected engineering workers, who are trusted with your data. Users also get to choose which datacenter they would like their data to be stored in. This can ease peace of mind and gives users more control over their hosting. All backups and snapshots are also stored within their datacenters. These are stored separately from all other data on a non-public network. This again improves the security of your sites. DigitalOcean has the staff to also monitor and identify potential malware and other threats within their system. This means any unusual activity or behaviours can be spotted easily and can be fixed quickly to stop any threats.  

Does DigitalOcean have a good support network?

DigitalOcean has a very large support network. their support ranges from a ticket system, tutorials, FAQ’s/Q&A’s, and community DO-ers. All the different types of support they offer, help a wide range of people including existing customers and other possible customers. One of the best ways DigitalOcean help out possible customers is by having a pre-sales inquiry. This inquiry allows almost anyone to inquire about the services offered by DigitalOcean. This is a great place for possible customers to learn more about DigitalOcean. You are also able to get a ticket if you’re an existing customer. Here you’re able to get in touch for a number of reasons. The reasons for getting in touch are as follows, your account, your app, your billing, your performance/platform, something is broken and I have a suggestion. What this means is the user can get in touch about a lot of topics, including basic and hard problems. Within the community, for DigitalOcean they have a tutorial section.  Almost 2000 tutorials are available for its customers, on hundreds of different topics. The tutorial part of the website is great because users have an alternative way of learning something without needing to contact DigitalOcean directly. Of course, if you can’t find what you’re after then you should contact directly through the ticket system. There is also a forum for all users to ask questions with near twenty thousand questions asked by users. Other users can reply to these questions. Again, this is great as it means people can learn off one another instead of going directly to the experts. Also, a lot of people tend to become experts themselves and answer a lot of peoples questions in these types of forums.

Benefits of DigitalOcean;

DigitalOcean has many benefits for them. One of the biggest benefits is the range of plans they have. Altogether DigitalOcean has 19 different plans with three different droplet sizes. Choosing the right plan for you has never been so easy. All these plans are unmanaged, which leads to my next point. Offering unmanaged hosting is another plus to DigitalOcean. With unmanaged hosting, it becomes more yours as you have more control. With this more control, you will need to put more effort into your hosting yourself. DigitalOcean offers good security and support. They have a range of methods you can use to get support from DigitalOcean. Security is also a benefit as they offer many methods to protect against hackers and malware. The range of tutorials DigitalOcean have is another advantage of DigitalOcean. There are over 1800 tutorials on the website, so finding help is never too far away. A refund will also be given if the uptime goes below the guaranteed 99.99%.  

Negatives of DigitalOcean;

The plans they offer is also a negative of DigitalOcean. They are very confusing to the normal person. To see the features of DigitalOcean away from the plans, you need to have an account with them. This means to even get an insight to DigitalOcean you have to give them your email and even your card details.  

My thoughts;

DigitalOcean seems to me like a great idea for hosting. Although it looks good, I personally wouldn’t use them as a provider myself. This is due to it being very confusing for me and many others a like with their plans. Many people who go with them have already great knowledge on hosting and how it works instead of being spooned fed with managed hosting.    

This article was last updated on 24th September 2019

  *ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE  WERE ACCURATE AT TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S OWN CONVERTER. *ALL PLANS AND PACKAGES MADE BY DIGITALOCEAN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY DIGITALOCEAN THEMSELVES.  

Check out other hosting reviews;WP Engine | SiteGround | GoDaddy | HostGator | iPage | Flywheel | DigitalOcean | Bluehost | DreamHost | InMotion | NameCheap  | 1&1 | Site5 | 123Reg | A2 | Liquid Web

To find out more about DigitalOcean and what they offer, check out DigitalOcean