I’ve been using DigitalOcean for years for my personal projects and Drupal-based websites. Here are the reasons I’ll keep using the service for a long time.
DigitalOcean initially offered a platform for managing virtual machines (VPSs) with SSD storage, back when solid-state drives were still expensive in the cloud hosting world compared with other hosting services. It also took a different approach from similar services such as Azure, AWS, and Rackspace: remarkably simple administration, designed entirely with software developers in mind.
Over time, the company has added more data centers and moved from offering Platform as a Service (PaaS) to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), with load balancers, private networks, storage, DNS management, and more—all while keeping simplicity at its core. Its dashboard is amazingly simple and gives you quick, accurate information about the status of your resources and your current accumulated cost.
At DigitalOcean, a virtual machine is called a Droplet. Unlike a traditional VPS, it includes security and performance monitoring at no extra cost. You can create a Droplet in seconds from a base installation of a Linux distribution or a preconfigured image with popular software packages (the LAMP, LEMP, or MEAN stacks, Docker, MySQL, WordPress, and so on). You can also create a Droplet from a snapshot of one of your own preconfigured machines.
Next, you receive an email with the root user’s password and the IP address of the newly created machine, and that’s about it: your new server is ready to access.
Although virtual machine prices keep falling, DigitalOcean offers a Droplet with a Linux distribution, 1 GB of RAM, 1 CPU, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB of transfer for $5 a month. That’s enough to experiment or publish applications with modest requirements (two of my websites—this one and www.gblanes.com—run on a machine with those specs and perform more than well enough). For now, the base images are always Linux distributions.
You could say that DigitalOcean is gradually evolving from supplying virtual servers to truly providing cloud services.
As with any hardware infrastructure, maintenance or upgrade activities are announced with enough notice to let you know that your Droplets may be affected (this doesn’t happen often, and service interruptions usually last only a few minutes). Some of my virtual machines have been running continuously for two years.
Another feature I especially like about DigitalOcean is its extensive tutorial section, which is exceptionally high quality. I use it often to solve problems or remind myself how to do one thing or another. I imagine they must have some sort of quality policy, because the documentation is genuinely well-edited, clear, and carefully prepared.
Another thing I really like about DigitalOcean is that Droplet monitoring and alerts are included at no extra cost. Recently, I was notified that one of my virtual machines was using excessive bandwidth because I hadn’t updated Drupal to the latest version. I later discovered that someone had exploited a vulnerability in that outdated Drupal version to install a Bitcoin miner… ahem.
Like other similar services, DigitalOcean has an API that lets you automate resource creation and manage their usage.
If you’re looking for a virtual machine provider for a project, DigitalOcean is one I recommend.