Detailed DigitalOcean Reviews for 2024

DigitalOcean is a web hosting provider that offers simple and scalable cloud hosting solutions for software developers and website owners. Founded in 2011, this American-based company now has multiple data centers all over the world including Canada, Singapore, India, and London. In 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines, making them a leader in the industry.

Because of DigitalOcean’s relevance in the hosting industry, there have been numerous DigitalOcean reviews – some less accurate than others. In this review, we’ll test this VPS hosting company ourselves to determine whether it truly is worth it. We’ll cover the following factors:

• Company Overview
• DigitalOcean Product Features and Highlights
• Plans and Pricing
• Pros and Cons
• DigitalOcean Customer Reviews
• DigitalOcean Competitors and Comparisons
• FAQs

DigitalOcean Company Overview

DigitalOcean’s main goal is to assist developers in building API backends or web apps on a robust infrastructure. Since its start in 2011, DigitalOcean has grown exponentially, providing high-quality hosting services to over 1 million developers and 150,000 businesses worldwide. Using DigitalOcean’s SSD (solid-state drive), developers can increase production, speed, and the generation of traffic to a site.

DigitalOcean prioritizes privacy and security and has implemented cloud firewalls and complex ISO 27001 certification technology. Featured products include Droplets, which are scalable virtual machines, and DigitalOcean Kubernetes, which are managed Kubernetes clusters. Together with these unique products, DigitalOcean also provides a variety of hosting solutions.

DigitalOcean Product Features and Highlights

In our thorough DigitalOcean review, we’ll take a closer look at its products and services. Identifying special features and product highlights will give us a clear indication of the company’s performance and quality.

Technology Tools

The company offers a great variety of developer tools including API, CLI, Monitoring, and Support. In order for developers to build on DigitalOcean’s API, they provide a wealth of documents and user guidelines on OAuth, metadata, and API. The API documentation makes using conventional HTTP requests easy and flexible.

The web-based control panel is easy to use with a point-and-click interface. Developers can access metrics, receive alerts, and monitor performance without configuration. Using these tools will help you scale your website at top speed while staying safe and secure.

Available Products

DigitalOcean offers a large range of hosting solutions. Since most users are looking for reliable hosting plans, that’s what we will focus on in this DigitalOcean web hosting review. It is clear that this company provides much more than other VPS hosting companies. Through its Droplets products, it gives the clients all the options necessary for creating a hosting solution that uniquely fits their needs.

Featured products include Droplets and Kubernetes. Droplets are Linux-based VMs (Virtual Machines). Each new droplet created by the developer is a new server. Droplets come with a choice between basic, CPU-optimized, memory-optimized, and general-purpose configurations.

Whereas Kubernetes offers the opportunity to grow and scale by automatically releasing clusters. This product eliminates the complexities of handling and managing the control panel.

DigitalOcean provides flexible developer-friendly cloud platforms. The following solutions can be added to help scale a business:

Spaces

Because it has a built-in Content Delivery Network, Spaces is perfect for scaling an online website. Spaces provide object storage that is S3-compatible and has a bandwidth of up to 1,024 GiB.

Load Balancers

This solution distributes traffic between three droplets which results in optimized availability. Many DigitalOcean reviews state that the $20 price tag for the load balancers is too high. Currently, DigitalOcean has lowered this price tag by 50% and charges only $10 per month for a basic plan.

Managed Databases

To ensure a reliable and secure site, the managed database solution simplifies the maintenance and procurement of a database.

Cloud Firewalls

Security is important when creating a website. Cloud Firewalls protect your site against viruses and cybercriminals. It also blocks malicious traffic and ensures that you and your visitors have a safe online experience.

Backups

In case something goes wrong, you can easily retrieve information, files, and documents saved in the backup system. This is another feature that makes it the perfect solution for WordPress-based sites looking for a hosting company.

Plans and Pricing

Hosting your website through DigitalOcean has many advantages. The Virtual Machines are specifically designed for developers. With this in mind, DigitalOcean Droplet plans are custom-made to host and scale sites of any size.

Some DigitalOcean hosting reviews complain that the pricing is a bit complex. Actually, it is quite simple and states a monthly cap with a flat hourly rate across all data centers. The five Droplets plans are as follow:

Basic Droplets

A shared CPU plan designed for blogs, discussion forums, small databases, CMS, and dev/test servers.

General Purpose Droplet

A dedicated CPU plan designed for ecommerce sites, SaaS, high-traffic web servers, and medium-sized databases.

CPU-Optimized Droplets

A CPU-optimized plan designed for ad serving, active front-end web servers, video encoding, machine learning, and CI/CD. The following prices are for the 1xSSD variant:

Memory-Optimized Droplet

A memory-optimized plan designed for real-time big data processing, high-performance databases, and in-memory caches. The following prices are for the 1xSSD variant:

Storage-Optimized Droplets

A storage-optimized plan designed for monitoring software, extra-large NoSQL databases, and other extra-large data warehouses. The following prices are for the 1xSSD variant:

Check out DigitalOcean’s price list for more options.

Privacy and Security Policy

DigitalOcean is committed to protecting its clients’ privacy. It is ISO certified (ISO/IEC 27001:2013). To help customers protect their servers, DigitalOcean suggests adding on its Firewall solution and SSH keys when creating droplets.

Other reseller hosting companies or VPS hosting companies will usually have an SSL certification. DigitalOcean also provides an option for customers to create a fully-managed SSL certificate when they manage their own DNS. Learn more about DigitalOcean’s privacy terms and conditions on its Trust Platform.

DigitalOcean Competitors and Alternatives

For anyone looking for a less complex DigitalOcean alternative, HostGator and SiteGround are two excellent choices. But how do they compare? Let’s have a closer look.

DigitalOcean vs HostGator

Unlike DigitalOcean, HostGator is built for beginners. With entry hosting prices starting at only $2.75 per month, HostGator is definitely a much cheaper option. HostGator provides more standard VPS hosting, shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated hosting solutions compared to DigitalOcean has a more unique approach – offering a variety of hosting solutions that can be adjusted to the developer’s needs.

Read the full review of Hostgator here. 

DigitalOcean vs SiteGround

Even though SiteGround also offers cloud hosting, like DigitalOcean, it comes with a lot of limits and only 4 plans. The biggest difference is that DigitalOcean gives its customers a clear summary of its pricing when it comes to memory, SSD space, and data transfer. Depending on the size of your site, you’ll pay accordingly. Smaller businesses can benefit from the more affordable prices offered by SiteGround, however.

Read the full review of SiteGround here. 

Conclusion

DigitalOcean is perfect for developers who want to build and host websites. You can have any type of website up and running when you use all the expert tools offered by DigitalOcean. The process is fast but secure and allows developers to stay in full control of their site’s infrastructure.

Considering the 8GB RAM per dedicated vCPU and over 7TB of SSD available, DigitalOcean’s 99.99% uptime is impressive. The amount of memory, data transfer, and SSD space available on their cloud hosting plans make them the perfect option for large-scale developers and businesses.