DigitalOcean.com VPS Review 2020
DigitalOcean is a highly potent cloud hosting provider claiming to be the simplest cloud platform for developers and teams. The New York company was founded in 2011 by 5 industry experts. The core team consists of 20 employees. From 12 datacenters the hosting company offers its hosting services to customers from 195 all over the world.
When you are a web technology enthusiast, sysadmin, web developer, webmaster or just someone with time and taste for the Internet, the fundamental thing is to find equipment with the best performance in terms of hardware, stability, quality technical support, but above all to have an affordable price, because: What does it help to find the best server if its price is sky-high?
That’s where DigitalOcean.com comes into play since the service offers Virtual Private Servers and Virtual Machines that are inexpensive but with high performance. The hosting provider is mainly known for being a cloud computing service that gives scalable VPS at very affordable prices.
DigitalOcean.com Cloud VPS
Droplets – Virtual Machines by DigitalOcean
The core services of the hosting provider include their so-called Droplets and their Kubernetes. Behind the term Droplets there is nothing else than virtual machines which offer app developers tailor-made infrastructures for the development of apps. DigitalOcean’s VMs and droplets can be selected flexibly according to the app’s requirements. In addition to standard droplets, which already offer a suitable environment for a wide range of applications, there are RAM-optimized and CPU-optimized droplets. These virtual machines can be individually equipped and booked in less than a minute. The resources of Droplets can be expanded at any time.
According to DigitalOcean, only about 25% of their total capacity is currently being utilized. So there’s still a lot of room for improvement in terms of the performance of the company’s resources.
Volumes (Block Storage) – Additional Storage Space
Volumes is the name of DigitalOcean’s data storage product that can be added to Droplets. So if you need more storage to your virtual machine, you can upgrade the system with volumes. Volumes are located on different servers than the virtual machines. Multiple copies protect the data from total loss in the event of a system failure.
You can upgrade from 1GB to maximum 16TB. Volumes can be expanded or reduced as needed to work cost-effectively at any time. In addition, the storage can be moved between different droplets, they are moved in encrypted state.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes
Kubernetes serves the orchestration of container systems. It provides all functions for controlling and monitoring the use of container applications. The open source platform therefore automates the setup, operation and also the scaling of containerized applications.
Kubernetes provides all functions for the control and monitoring of the use of container applications. This includes the following features:
- Automation of container deployment and software rollout
- Optimizing the use of computer resources
- Numerous options for permanent data storage (Persistent Storage)
- Integrated Service Discovery
- Autoscaling
- High availability
Automation of container deployment and software rollout
Kubernetes summarizes container images, their configuration and the number of required instances in deployments, according to the orchestration system. Kubernetes automatically monitors the parameters of a deployment. The tool ensures that the desired number of containers is running at all times. Kubernetes distributes changes to the software or the configuration with a rollout. This process can be paused, continued and undone (rollback).
Optimization of the use of computer resources
Kubernetes independently deploys the containers of a deployment where appropriate resources are available. The user can define minimum and maximum values of resource usage (computing time, storage space) for the containers to give the orchestration tool a framework.
Numerous options for permanent data storage (Persistent Storage)
Containers are stateless. For the permanent storage of configuration and user data Kubernetes offers interfaces to numerous services such as EBS from Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.
Integrated Service Discovery
Required network connections to the Internet or to other containers are recognized by Kubernetes independently. The tool not only opens these connections, but also distributes the data traffic automatically to suitable containers (load balancing). A fully functional service discovery via DNS is already integrated.
Autoscaling
Kubernetes allows the container system to adapt automatically to changing loads and available computer resources by automatically scaling the container deployment. In order to meet growing demands, it is therefore sufficient to provide appropriate resources. The application does not need to be adapted for this purpose. An increase in performance of the application can thus be carried out completely transparently for the customer.
High Availability
High availability features are also an essential factor for trouble-free operation. The container technology offers an excellent basis for redundant resource use. With Cluster Federation, Kubernetes extends these capabilities to entire container systems.
Special Kubernetes terminology
According to its special characteristics as an orchestration system, Kubernetes also uses its own naming conventions to some extent. In this usage, a node is a computer system, physical or virtual, that is set up to run containers under the control of Kubernetes.
A cluster is a complete system consisting of nodes. It is managed by the Kubernetes Control Plane, which is software like kubectl and a set of APIs for interacting with the container system. Container on the same node groups Kubernetes into pods. A Pod can also consist of a single container and is the smallest organizational unit in Kubernetes.
Digitalocean Spaces – Low Cost SSD Storage
The object storage product of the hosting provider is called “Spaces”. Spaces is S3-compatible and has a built-in CDN allowing for easier scaling while being affordable and reliable. Spaces start at $5 / month only, with 250GB storage, 1TB outbound traffic, unlimited uploads and spaces. Each additional GB costs $0.02 only. Additional outbound traffic costs $0.01 per GB, which we consider a fair and transparent pricing.
For those who don’t know what is SSD storage or solid state can read this description, but in general terms it’s a relatively new technology in which the old hard drives get replaced by new and innovative solid state hard drives. The latter have the advantage of being faster and have greater resistance to shocks or crashes, but its biggest advantage is the speed, where thanks to this technology the transfer is faster.
In fact, this technology is that good that Apple was the forerunner in bringing this technology into their MacBook Air. Since then all manufacturers are opting for SSD disks because they are faster.
Database Hosting
One of DigitalOcean’s many different, highly specialized services is professional database hosting. Administration is handled entirely by DigitalOcean. This means that setup, backups and updates are handled entirely by the provider – one less worry for the customer. Scalability also applies here. DigitalOcean also has a security system that they call automated failover. If the system fails, data handling is immediately taken over by another node.
DigitalOcean VPS Packages & Pricing
As I mentioned at the beginning Digital Ocean provides affordable prices with respect to the VPS features you need, below is the Digital Ocean price list:
Standard Droplets
CPU Optimized Droplets
As you can see they have several plans, and many customers particularly feel comfortable with the VPS plan for $5 USD per month, since many applications people are implementing do not require much performance or bandwidth. But for a company we particularly recommend the package of $10 USD because the RAM is doubled, as well as bandwidth, but this is of course based on the requirements of a company, so it depends on its system administrator, the size of your project or if you are a programmer or web designer.
Choose Between Hourly Or Monthly Rate
Digital Ocean is one of a few cloud hosting providers that offer the choice of getting billed by the hour for the usage of their service. This is especially convenient for people or companies who need to use the VPS for particular use cases that just occur couple of times a month, for instance. Then it is a big benefit if they don’t have to pay for a full month usage but just for couple of hours which can lower their cost for cloud services remarkably.
Ease Of Use
There is no doubt that something we really like about Digital Ocean is its ease of use, and specifically we refer to the administration panel where you have the ability to manage each of our VPS.
In the user back-end we will have our notifications at hand, as well as the virtual machines or “Droplets” as they call them. Just create a vServer and in a matter of seconds we will have the access credentials in our email.
One point to consider is that the person in charge of the Digital Ocean account must have some knowledge in GNU/Linux since we are given a newly installed system with root access, although at this point it is superfluous to say that a person looking for a VPS is because he knows how to manage it.
Performance Monitoring
When developing efficient applications, it is essential to be able to constantly monitor performance. DO has a practical monitoring interface for this purpose that allows you to permanently check CPU usage, memory usage and bandwidth.
1-Click App Marketplace
One of the many practical features of DigitalOcean is its 1-Click App function. As the name implies, you can install the programs you need on your VPS with just one click, including applications like Docker, LAMP, LEMP, MongoDB or WordPress.
The 1-Click Applications include:
- MySQL
- LAMP stack
- LEMP
- Docker
- MongoDB
- WordPress
- Node.js
- PhpMyAdmin
- Ghost
- Ruby On Rails
- Machine Learning
- Grafana
- Buddy
- Cloudron
- Metabase
- cPanel
- Plesk
- Jenkins
Variety Of Operating Systems
This is another thing that we like about Digital Ocean. They give you plenty of Linux distributions to choose from according to our needs, just click on the “Create Droplet” button and we will be ready to create our first virtual machine in our VPS.
As I mentioned the variety is rich because it allows us to install Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and even Arch Linux for lovers of minimalism. Another interesting thing is that it gives us the possibility to create virtual machines with prefabricated “packages”, since: What happens if I want a wordpress to set up my personal blog? Don’t worry, in Digital Ocean they already thought about that and they offer you several packages for that purpose.
- Ubuntu
- Fedora
- Debian
- CentOS
- Arch Linux
- CoreOS
- FreeBSD
- CloudLinux
Another thing is that the creation of virtual machines is very intuitive because you only have to place a name for the virtual machine, select the size of it based on your budget and / or requirements, select which country you want your virtual machine, select the operating system to occupy and finally click on the button “Create Droplet”.
The creation process is quite fast as it only takes 60 seconds. Then you only need to enter your VPS server with the access credentials that came to you via email.
DigitalOcean.com Customer Service
The technical support is most comfortable since it works via the ticketing system, and I must mention that their team is quite capable as far as technical issues are concerned. Obviously regarding a VPS we won’t be able to ask such obvious questions as: How to install apache? (or at least I haven’t tried it). Either way their customer service is good.
Payment Options
The cloud hosting service accepts payments by credit card and Paypal. For our taste there could be some more payment methods, like wire transfer or even better, cryptocurrency payments. But as of now customers have to be satisfied with the limited options they have.
Account Security
If you are a paranoid Geek, you like to feel safe and protected. Since for us it is a priority to know that our accesses are well protected and since the emergence of security by two factors your cell phone is something that you always have to carry with you. For those who do not know – security by double factor is a security measure that gives us a PIN through an SMS or email – or even better – a 2FA app, which needs to be used like a second one time password to enter the account. So with this method accounts are protected pretty well.
Bottomline
In general we consider it a very good VPS Hosting service since you have the possibility of accessing a VPS for the ridiculous amount of $5 USD per month, if you compare this monthly subscription price with some other company, you will see that the price is very affordable.
We think Digital Ocean is a really good company with efficient solutions at a really comfortable price, and what we like most is that technologically they are at the forefront. Their VPS package for $5 USD a month is popular for a reason.