DigitalOcean Review

DOcean

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DigitalOcean in its own words

DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. As of January 2018, DigitalOcean was the third-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers. DigitalOcean also marked its presence in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 List in 2018.

DigitalOcean was founded as a VPS provider in 2012.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.

It has datacenters in:
  • Canada
  • Germany
  • India
  • Netherlands
  • Singapore
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Quick Links


DigitalOcean VPS Features

Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.

Feature Value Comment
Hourly Billing  Yes
DDOS Protection  No

DigitalOcean recommends using the services of CloudFlare to mitigate DDOS attacks.

Backups  No

Backups are available for a fee.
Snapshots are available for a fee.

Control Panel  Builtin
SSH Keys Setup  Yes
Total Number of Datacenters  12
Number of Datacenter Continents  3
Monitoring Charts  Yes

Network bandwidth, CPU usage, disk I/O.

Admin REST API  Yes
Upgrade VPS from admin console  Yes
Mobile Friendly UI  Yes
Reverse DNS  No
Accepted Forms of Payment  Credit cards, Paypal
Hidden CPU Model  No
Affiliate Program  Yes
Firewall  No
Shelving  No
Compare Features

Pros and Cons

Strengths

  • Numerous datacenter locations.
  • Modern, intuitive and fast UI.
  • Large catalog of cloud services.

Weaknesses

  • Slowish performance on average.

DigitalOcean Extra Services

In addition to features included in VPS plans, DigitalOcean also sells the services marked green in the following table:

Backups   Block storage   Object storage   Load balancer  
Floating IP addresses   Team Management   Managed databases   Serverless
DDoS protection Kubernetes   GPU instances Private network  

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

For each DigitalOcean VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.

See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.

Average Provisioning Time Min Provisioning Time Max Provisioning Time Number of VPS Samples
35s 30s 40s 2

Control Panel Screenshots


Cloud Storage Prices

For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.

Storage Type Price / GB / month Description Restriction
Object $0.020 Object storage is called "Spaces" at DO.
$5 for 250GB/month that include 1TB of outbound transfer (CDN included)

DigitalOcean object storage
250GB minimum
Block $0.100 Volumes are encrypted at rest, replicated multiple times and can be resized live.
DigitalOcean block storage
Snapshots $0.050 Snapshots are created on users requests and are images of block storage disk volumes.
DigitalOcean snapshots storage
Backups $0.050 Prices vary depending on droplet size: backups are 20% of droplet total price. Therefore backup prices are considerably more expansive on General Purpose droplets.
When backups are enabled, DO will create a disk image of the droplet once per week and will keep it for 4 weeks.

DigitalOcean backups storage
Prices vary depending on droplet monthly price.

Network Bandwidth Prices

These are the network bandwidth prices charged by DigitalOcean for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.

For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.

Description Price / GB
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged (the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 4 TB / month (for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Transfer pool: yes
DigitalOcean networking
$0.010/GB

DigitalOcean Coupons

This provider offers the following coupon:

Link: https://m.do.co/c/f6f1f383e46f

Value: $200

Sign up using the following link and get $200 credit over 60 days.


DigitalOcean Instance Types and Plans

How fast are DigitalOcean servers?
Screen all DigitalOcean VPS Plans

All DigitalOcean instance types

Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.

Plan Number of CPU cores RAM Storage Monthly Price
Family:
Basic
Instance Type:
Regular

Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU.

Basic Regular 1GB 1 core 1 1.0GB 25GB $6.00 / month
Basic Regular 2GB 1 core 1 2.0GB 50GB $12.00 / month
Basic Regular 4GB 2 cores 2 4.0GB 80GB $24.00 / month
Family:
Basic
Instance Type:
Premium Intel

Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU.

Basic Premium Intel 4GB 2cores 2 4.0GB 120GB $32.00 / month
Family:
General purpose
Instance Type:
General Purpose Droplets

General Purpose Droplets have a balanced ratio of memory to dedicated CPU, suitable for a wide variety of production workloads. They’re best for general purpose workloads that require dedicated computer power.
Around 25GB storage per vCPU. Double the storage for 8% more.

General Purpose 2 cores 2 8.0GB 50GB $68.00 / month
Family:
Memory optimized
Instance Type:

Memory-optimized Droplets provide 8GB RAM for each vCPU. The additional memory can help you avoid excessively swapping to disk or getting out-of-memory errors, both of which significantly impact your application's performance and stability.
Around 50GB storage per vCPU.

VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
Compute optimized
Instance Type:
CPU-Optimized Droplets Regular

CPU-Optimized Droplets provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. This configuration is optimal for applications that demand fast, consistent performance from dedicated vCPUs, but are not so memory-intensive that they require the additional RAM provided by General Purpose Droplets.
Around 25GB storage per vCPU. Double the storage for 8% more.

CPU Optimized 4GB 2 4.0GB 50GB $47.00 / month
Family:
Compute Optimized
Instance Type:
CPU-Optimized Droplets Premium Intel

CPU-Optimized Droplets provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. This configuration is optimal for applications that demand fast, consistent performance from dedicated vCPUs, but are not so memory-intensive that they require the additional RAM provided by General Purpose Droplets.
Around 25GB storage per vCPU. Double the storage for 8% more.

VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
Basic
Instance Type:
Premium AMD

Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU.

Basic Premium AMD 1GB 1core 1 1.0GB 25GB $7.00 / month
Basic Premium AMD 2GB 1core 1 2.0GB 50GB $14.00 / month
Basic Premium AMD 4GB 2cores 2 4.0GB 80GB $28.00 / month

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