DigitalOcean Hosting Review PROS & CONS (2023) – Excellent Choice For Hosting?

DigitalOcean is an American cloud hosting provider which was launched in New York City. In this DigitalOcean hosting review, I will show why it is first choice for many looking for reliable, affordable, and robust hosting.

As of today, DigitalOcean has data centers worldwide. It provides the developers with cloud services that help deploy and scaling applications which run simultaneously on multiple computers.

In terms of web-facing computers, DigitalOcean is the third-largest hosting company in the world. Many DigitalOcean reviews regard it as a cheap, simple, and strong computing platform that can be used for hosting, apps, blogs, or websites.

However, since the platform is packed with technicalities, it is only suitable for developers or experienced users.

NOTE: If you signup for DigitalOcean hosting via my link, you will receive $100 in credit.

 

DigitalOcean Hosting Review

Are you on the lookout for a hosting provider for your blog or a website? Do various mixed hosting reviews make it difficult for you to make a firm decision? Be assured that you can for sure find the best and the most suitable hosting provider for your apps, blogs, and websites by the end of this review.

As of today, DigitalOcean hosting is believed to be one of the cheapest and the most robust cloud computing platform to host websites, blogs, or apps.

 

 

Our detailed yet on-point DigitalOcean review will indeed help you decide whether or not you should go for DigitalOcean. So, by the end of it, you’d know whether you should try out the hosting and the cloud computing services of the DigitalOcean hosting over the other hosting providers or not.

 

Why DigitalOcean?

Choosing the right WordPress hosting provider is not an easy task. The name DigitalOcean has gained and established a place for itself in the industry of cloud hosting providers. The reason for its bourgeoning success can be attributed to its low prices, easy usability, reliable infrastructure, and robust nature.

DigitalOcean is an American cloud hosting company which has been developed keeping in view the need and the requirements of the developers. Ever since the launch of its first server back in 2011, the company has only grown bigger and bigger with every passing year. As of today, it has a huge customer base.

 

 

DigitalOcean lets you develop a server or droplets (in DigitalOcean jargon) in less than one minute with simplicity as the core ideal in its mission statement. Now, let’s take a look at some of the most significant features.

 

DigitalOcean Features

In addition to the droplets that DigitalOcean is mostly famous for, it has several additional features. Here let’s discuss a few of the most important ones.

1. Kubernetes
With Kubernetes, you can easily scale up and deploy containerized apps in clusters. Using DigitalOcean, you get all the primary Kubernetes components for free. So, does that mean that you’ll be only paying for the resources that are used? Well, yes, most definitely.

 

2. Load Balancers
It is easy to enable load balancers on DigitalOcean. Once they are enabled, these load balancers work forth to spread out your traffic to the multiple droplets. This ensures that all the users have an optimal experience. For the load balancers, you’ll have to pay out a minimal and flat hourly fee.

 

3. One-Click Apps
With DigitalOcean, you get one-click apps for your droplets. As a result of this, you actually happen to save more time. These apps comprise Lamp Stack, WordPress, MySQL, Ruby On Rails, Docker, Node.js, etc.

 

4. Collaboration and Reliability
The company has made it incredibly easy for the teams to come together and collaborate in building DigitalOcean-enabled apps. As part of this, the teams work together and are billed all in one invoice but do not share the credentials, which could have compromised the security.

However, to strengthen the reliability further, the company offers “Floating IPs,” where the IP addresses are quickly redefined. In any case, the droplet fails; the IP is then re-assigned to a standby droplet to ensure that the app keeps running.

 

What Are Droplets?

The virtual machines of DigitalOcean are called “droplets.” It has 5 types of droplets: Basic, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, Memory Optimized, and Storage Optimized.

The primary benefit of using the droplets is that they let you spin up the new machines with ease if you happen to get a lot of demand all at once. Moreover, the type of droplet chosen by you depends on the factors such as traffic. For instance, if you have a growing blog, you should opt for a basic droplet.

 

 

CPU Optimized droplets are the virtual machines that come with beefier CPUs mainly usable for highly computation-based jobs. You can use the CPU Optimized droplets to do something like high-volume scraping, machine learning, or video encoding. In any other case, the standard droplets would suffice the purpose.

CPU optimized droplets are fairly more expensive than Basic droplets. It also has more powerful and dedicated CPUs, which is a primary reason for its high cost. So, unless your need is powerful and dedicated CPUs, you can opt for the Basic droplets.

There is a vast array of choices of operating systems that you can include for your droplets like CloudLinux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, CoreOS, etc.

Please know these are primarily all the pre-built images. So, there’s absolutely no need for you to waste your time installing the OS. Instead, you can begin deploying your web page right away.

With DigitalOcean, you have the freedom to mix and match the two different types of droplets. So, what does this mean? This means that in case needed, you can use the basic droplets for your frontend web servers which provide you the interface, and the other CPU Optimized servers can be used for the support on the backend. In addition to this, you can further load balance the droplets to ensure that your web app is available.

 

How To Create Droplets?

Here are a set of instructions that you need to follow to create a Droplet (cloud instance) with the help of a DigitalOcean control panel:

• Firstly, Log in to the DigitalOcean control panel. From here, you will have to select to create a Droplet from your dashboard.
• Now, the next screen will appear where you’ll have to Create Droplet page. On this page, you can mention Droplet configuration.
• The popular defaults are already selected, so you can scroll to the end and Create Droplet.
• To customize this droplet, the first step would be choosing an image that would include a pre-installed app and your Operating System.
• Next, you can select the droplet size, i.e., the amount of RAM and storage.
• Further, you can add block storage to create additional storage volumes which can be annexed to the droplets.
• Next, you’ll have to choose a data center region close to you and your customers.
• You can now add SSH keys to give your droplet additional security.
• Finalize, and you are done with creating a droplet.

 

DigitalOcean Hosting Plans

The mega-selling point of DigitalOcean is its wide array of plans. This flexibility in the plans makes it the most suitable pick for both companies and individuals. As a result, it also gets easy for a developer to select the plan tailored according to their desired needs.

There is a wide variety of types of hosting available for business. Each of these hosting plans comes with a variety of advantages and disadvantages.

One of the most prominent hosting options found in the market is Shared Hosting. This is also the cheapest hosting alternative; however, it is ranked the lowest when it comes to server performance or the available resources. Shared hosting basically means when a single server is shared among several different websites where all of them compete for resources and space.

VPS or the Virtual Private Server hosting is a step up from the shared hosting. It is believed to be one of the best available choices for you if you or your business requires more resources and better performance than a shared hosting plan can offer.

In the VPS, your server will take the form of a single server that has been split into several smaller virtual servers wherein each of these servers is allocated exclusively to a website. In VPS, one website is not competing with others on the server for space and resources.

 

DigitalOcean For WordPress Hosting

WordPress is the most popular CMS or content management system. It is used by more than 60 million people across the globe. With DigitalOcean, you get the one-click installation of WordPress hosting solutions.

DigitalOcean also provides you a plethora of memory capacities and storage capacities depending on your company’s individual needs.

The major and the most crucial benefit of using DigitalOcean hosting is that it uses SSD storage on all of its servers. Unlike their HDD counterparts, the SSD servers don’t have any moving parts.

As a result, these tend to work more quickly and perform fairly faster than the others. This comes as an important benefit for your business as it allows the customers to help access the site faster than the rivals.

 

 

The DigitalOcean hosting has a plethora of data centers found across the globe.  The availability of the data centers in different countries is helpful for you to target the users that are found in that country. This also means, the more this data center is in the proximity, the faster your website will be.

 

Control Panel & Interface

The Control panel does rule the web hosting industry; however, DigitalOcean is not your regular web hosting provider.

If you need a control panel, you will have to purchase and install it all by yourself. You don’t get a control panel with one-click deployments. This platform is mainly useful for developers or people who have a favorite UNIX shell and are okay with not being given a graphical control panel.

 

 

The target market of this host mainly includes the hard-core developer who resides inside an editor and an SSH window so that the absence of the Control Panel doesn’t seem like a massive loss.

DigitalOcean already comes with a well-designed interface for both monitoring and deploying the droplets. Under this, you can manage your projects and the droplets using the menu bar.

 

DigitalOcean Hosting Pros & Cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using DigitalOcean hosting:

PROS

• Digital Ocean is truly a complete cloud engine that includes virtual machine, Kubernetes, app engine, storage, database, and many more.
• Their app engine is very easy, economical, scalable, and adaptable for web, rest API, and software development.
• Quick deployment.
• Affordable pricing.
• Server quality is great.
• Reliability is top-notch.
• Droplet backups are easy to enable and affordable.
• Documentation and tutorials are excellent.

CONS

• It could be a little hard for beginners.
• Even if you are not new to this, the setup of the server might take time.
• No live support available for the user (although their ticket support is quite fast).
• Not offering some important pre-installed systems like Bitnami apps, ODOO, multisite WordPress, and a few others.

 

DigitalOcean Alternatives

It is obviously true that DigitalOcean is not the only cloud hosting provider out there. Moreover, if you are seeking a DIY approach to the cloud, there are various other providers that you can opt for.

 

Cloudways vs. DigitalOcean

Honestly, if I were to host a web app developed by me, I would either opt for hosting it on DigitalOcean or Cloudways. In reality, Cloudways is a partner of DigitalOcean and is designed on top of its services.

The difference between the two is that Cloudways is fully managed. They ensure due care for the server setup and maintenance on the platform of your choice. So, all you have to worry about is the application. The additional fee on this is incredibly low, and you can pay as you go.

So, if you feel that the entire server setup (security, Apache setup, etc.) is a bit too much for your portal at the moment, then you can opt for Cloudways for a simpler alternative. For more info, you can check my Cloudways review.

 

SiteGround vs. DigitalOcean

The cloud architecture of SiteGround isn’t as buzzword-compliant as DigitalOcean, but you can still spin up and tear down the virtual machines as needed.

In SiteGround, the server technology is, however, on par with DigitalOcean. Sadly, the cloud hosting plans of SiteGround is fairly more expensive but are fully managed since they come with optional cPanel & WHM.

 

Kinsta vs DigitalOcean

Kinsta offers managed WordPress hosting based on the Google Cloud Platform that is of extremely high quality. Like DigitalOcean, Kinsta has a modern UI and setup process, but they maintain and set up servers for you. In terms of cost, it is relatively costlier but is still reasonable for businesses to afford.

 

DigitalOcean Hosting Review

DigitalOcean is planned mainly for the developers. If you need simple web hosting without giving too much thought to the technical details, then DigitalOcean is not for you. In this case, I suggest you check HostPapa, Cloudways, WP Engine, SiteGround, HostArmada, GreenGeeks, 10Web hosting, or some other affordable WordPress hosting providers.

DigitalOcean is considered a suitable pick for developers who need flexibility and more detailed control of the servers. This company is most suitable for self-sufficient developers who like researching their own answers and managing their own servers.