DigitalOcean Review: Excellent Hosting for Developers
DigitalOcean focuses on developers but nevertheless offers a simple interface. Their cloud hosting offering and features are practically unmatched.
DigitalOcean review overview
Speed
Access to the latest server hardware, so it's fast.
Uptime
99.99% uptime guarantee and robust infrastructure
Support
Support is kind of nonexistent, unless you pay up.
Simplicity
Self-designed dashboard that works perfectly.
Features
Everything developers need (and much more).
Costs
Fair pricing and cheaper than the competition.
Our score:
4 / 5
Benefits
Disadvantages
DigitalOcean is an American cloud hosting company founded in 2011 that has positioned itself at the cutting edge of hosting technology practically from day one. It was one of the first hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines and one of the first hosting companies to offer VPS hosting for less than $5 per month.
This made it particularly popular among independent developers who want to launch their own web apps at an affordable price.
DigitalOcean is a provider where it's clearly a case of what you see is what you get.
Their extremely extensive product range is super transparent in terms of both pricing and technological specifications, and no empty promises are made about things like customer service (which is actually very limited – unless you pay handsomely for it).
In this review, I'll help you determine if DigitalOcean is the right hosting provider for you.
DigitalOcean at a glance
| Uptime guarantee | ✓ |
| Customer Service | Standard email (response within a day), premium support options for an additional monthly fee |
| Managed WordPress | ✕ |
| Types of hosting | VPS, cloud |
| Basis features | 99.99% uptime SLA, launch servers within minutes, servers available for every application type |
| Most suitable for | Developers |
| Server locations | 14 data centers |
| Price from | $4 per month |
DigitalOcean speed, uptime and customer service
DigitalOcean is lightning fast, has exceptionally good uptime, and offers support that's nothing to write home about (this is by design).
Speed
DigitalOcean offers numerous server types and even the most affordable ones are truly fast.
In our Cloudways review (Cloudways is a managed hosting service owned by DigitalOcean) we tested one of DigitalOcean's more affordable servers.
To borrow from that review:
Looking at DigitalOcean as an example, we can see that with their Premium offering they use Intel Xeon 2nd Generation Scalable Processors with built-in AI acceleration and Intel Mesh architecture.
On their cheapest plan, I installed a WordPress website. The speed I got with this placed them already within the top 5% fastest web hosts.
Uptime
DigitalOcean offers a 99.99% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is exceptionally good. Many other hosting providers offer an uptime guarantee that doesn't exceed 99.9%.
It's very simple: if a hosting company offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee, then they are confident about their tech stack.
Over the past few months, I had a server running at DigitalOcean whose uptime I monitored using UptimeRobot.
The uptime looked like this:
But anyway, as I always maintain, the performance of a single server within a hosting provider isn't that interesting. It's much more important to look at the overall performance that a provider delivers. You can get a picture of this by digging through user reviews and forums.
My conclusion after doing this is that the uptime of DigitalOcean is indeed excellent. Complaints are rare and large-scale downtime has not occurred so far.
Customer Service
The support at DigitalOcean is quite spartan and this is a deliberate choice on their part.
DigitalOcean is a DIY provider for tech enthusiasts, and it's expected that you solve problems yourself through their extensive knowledge base or support community.
There is email support, but the response time is roughly a day, and in my experience, the team can only provide truly helpful assistance with very few issues.
You can purchase support plans, but even with those, the situation doesn't improve much in my opinion. The Developer plan, which costs $24 per month, offers nothing more than general guidance from our staff and still has a wait time of 8 hours.
There is also a Premium plan for $999. With this, you'll be treated with kid gloves and get access to “dedicated technical and business advisors,” but what I find peculiar is that there's still a waiting time of up to 30 minutes. If I'm spending a grand per month on premium support, I'd expect to speak to a human being within a minute.
Usability and features
DigitalOcean is easy to set up and use thanks to an excellent dashboard.
Setting up hosting
DigitalOcean has an exceptionally smooth onboarding process that lets you start an account within minutes.
You pay at DigitalOcean using credit card, Google Pay, or PayPal.
Dashboard
The DigitalOcean dashboard is exceptionally well designed. You can use it to order and launch servers in just a few minutes, you get access to support and the knowledge base, and of course you can handle matters such as setting up your backups.
Hosting features and extras
Among the more interesting features of DigitalOcean are:
- Free website monitoring and notifications when something goes wrong
- Free cloud firewalls
- 99.99% uptime guarantee
- Data centers in 14 locations worldwide
- You can manage your infrastructure with the command line via DigitalOcean's CLI tools
- Set up servers entirely to your preference with RAM, CPU, and storage options
To emphasize this once more: DigitalOcean targets experienced users, so none of these features are particularly interesting for beginners.
Costs
DigitalOcean's most popular product line is their droplets: virtual machines that you can get online within a few seconds.
You can choose between the regular CPU, Premium Intel, and Premium AMD here.
Their documentation, or one of their sales staff, can help you figure out which droplet is exactly right for your needs.
Compared to competing cloud hosting services, DigitalOcean is attractively priced:
What do users think of DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean evokes quite strong love-hate feelings among its users.
The service receives a lot of 5-star reviews, but also has a significant number of 1-star reviews weighing them down.
The complaints mainly relate to support being unreachable and DigitalOcean's automated systems sometimes blocking accounts without reason. These two issues together obviously form a rather deadly combination.
DigitalOcean alternatives
Looking for unmanaged Dutch servers? Check out mijn.host (learn more about them in our review).
Vultr is the direct competitor of DigitalOcean that more or less does the same thing as them.
Cloudways is a managed hosting company that was acquired by DigitalOcean a few years ago, focused on WordPress users (read more about them in our Cloudways review). With them, you get access to Digital Ocean's cloud infrastructure, but the servers are managed for you. You also get access to 24/7 support.
Conclusion
DigitalOcean is an excellent hosting provider for technical users and businesses that want to scale quickly and have their own sysadmin personnel on staff.
Mentioning the poor support as a disadvantage would be a bit unfair, as this is what allows the prices to be kept so low. In other words, in this case it's a feature, not a bug.
DigitalOcean is a high-tech hosting provider where much of the operational work is automated. This can subsequently lead to problems for some users. For example, their account gets closed without reason or they can't create an account at all. What's particularly frustrating is that it's often difficult to get in touch with the support team at present.
Admittedly, the odds of this happening are small. Nevertheless, DigitalOcean, considering some rather toxic user reviews, should really work harder on this.
