DigitalOcean - hosting provider overview. Prices, benefits and comparison with competitors
- Features and Benefits of DigitalOcean
- DigitalOcean's Products and Services
- DigitalOcean's Customers
- Pricing
- Marketplace and community
- Monitoring and Scaling
- Load Balancers
- Competitors
DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting provider that offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms for software developers. It provides computing resources to users remotely, allowing them to create, modify, and destroy virtual servers on demand. Here are some key features and benefits of DigitalOcean:
- Low pricing and transparent pricing model
- 99.99% uptime SLA and 14 globally distributed data centers
- Flexible hosting options and the ability to choose from the most common frameworks and languages
- App Platform, which provides hosting for 3 static sites for free, and its Basic plan that starts at $5 a month
- Extensive library of documentation and tutorials
DigitalOcean's primary offerings are for application and website hosting use cases. To deploy DigitalOcean's IaaS environment, developers launch a private virtual machine (VM) instance, which the company calls a droplet. DigitalOcean Droplets are comparable to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Azure instances but don't support Microsoft Windows instances. DigitalOcean also offers Kubernetes, a managed solution that is easy to scale and includes a 99.5% SLA for HA and free control plane.DigitalOcean is popular with open-source developers and competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides APIs for automation and integration with third-party tools, extensive guides to help users through complicated setups, and uptime guarantees for VMs and storage of 99.99%. DigitalOcean's community of developers and users is also a great resource for developers.
Features and Benefits of DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting provider that offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms for software developers. Here are some of the features and benefits of DigitalOcean:Features:
- Low pricing and transparent pricing model
- 99.99% uptime SLA and 14 globally distributed data centers
- Flexible hosting options and the ability to choose from the most common frameworks and languages
- App Platform, which provides hosting for 3 static sites for free, and its Basic plan that starts at $5 a month
- Extensive library of documentation and tutorials
- DigitalOcean Droplets, which are simple, scalable virtual machines for all web hosting and VPS hosting needs
- DigitalOcean Kubernetes, which is a managed solution that is easy to scale and includes a 99.5% SLA for HA and free control plane
- Managed Kafka, more Droplet choices, and GPU's for AI/ML apps
Benefits:
- Ease of use: The user interface and management panel are designed to be easy to understand.
- APIs: APIs are available for automation and integration with third-party tools.
- Documentation: DigitalOcean has extensive guides to help users through complicated setups.
- Uptime: DigitalOcean offers uptime guarantees for VMs and storage of 99.99%, meaning availability stated in service-level agreements closely matches AWS.
- Cost-effective: DigitalOcean is known for its low pricing and transparent pricing model, making it an affordable option for startups and small-to-midsize businesses.
- Scalability: DigitalOcean's flexible hosting options and the ability to choose from the most common frameworks and languages make it easy to scale as your business grows.
- Community: DigitalOcean has a community of developers and users who share knowledge and resources, making it a great resource for developers.
- Total Economic Impact: According to a Total Economic Impact study by Forrester, an organization experiences benefits of $2.37 million over three years versus costs of $829,000, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1.55 million and an ROI of 186%.
Overall, DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting provider that offers simple, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud computing solutions built for startups and small-to-midsize businesses. Its features and benefits make it a popular choice for developers and businesses alike.
DigitalOcean's Products and Services
DigitalOcean offers a range of products and services for cloud hosting. Here are some of the key products and services:
- DigitalOcean Droplets: DigitalOcean Droplets are simple, scalable virtual machines for all web hosting and VPS hosting needs. They are Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on top of virtualized hardware. Each Droplet you create is a new server you can use, either standalone or as part of a larger, cloud-based infrastructure. DigitalOcean Droplets are available in Basic, General Purpose, Memory-, or CPU-Optimized VMs, and can be spun up in as little as 55 seconds. They come with a 99.99% uptime SLA, simple security tools, and predictable monthly pricing.
- DigitalOcean Kubernetes: DigitalOcean Kubernetes is a managed solution that is easy to scale and includes a 99.5% SLA for HA and free control plane. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. DigitalOcean Kubernetes is a fully managed service that provides a simple and cost-effective way to deploy and manage containerized applications.
- Managed Kafka: DigitalOcean offers a fully managed Kafka service that provides a scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available platform for streaming data. Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. DigitalOcean's Managed Kafka service is designed to be easy to use and provides a simple and cost-effective way to build and manage streaming data pipelines.
- More Droplet choices: DigitalOcean offers a wide range of shared and dedicated vCPU Droplets. Check out their recommendations for choosing the right Droplet for your workload.
- GPU's for AI/ML apps: DigitalOcean offers GPU-optimized Droplets that are designed for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads. These Droplets come with NVIDIA GPUs and are optimized for deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
- Managed databases: launch a database cluster with just a few clicks and then access it via simplified UI or API. Easily migrate your database from another location with minimal downtime. Available engines is MongoDB, Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Redis. Resize your database clusters at any time to add more CPUs, RAM, and storage. Easily add more nodes to increase your operations and performance. In the event of a failure, Managed Databases will automatically switch data handling to a standby node to minimize downtime.
- Cloud storage: Spaces Object storage (S3 compatible) and Block volume storage.
DigitalOcean's Customers
- DigitalOcean enables everyone from developers building personal websites to high-growth startups launching new products. DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services are designed to be simple, scalable, and cost-effective, making them accessible to a wide range of customers. Whether you're an individual developer looking to host a personal website or a high-growth startup launching a new product, DigitalOcean has a solution that can meet your needs.
- DigitalOcean has a large and diverse customer base. According to DigitalOcean's website, their customers include "individual developers, startups, and SMBs, as well as larger enterprises and organizations." DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services are used by customers in a wide range of industries, including e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.
- DigitalOcean has received positive feedback from many of its customers. For example, Iouri Kostine, the founder of a startup called SmartHOTEL, said that DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services "provide the perfect balance between simplicity and flexibility." Cameron Van Orman, the CTO of a startup called Viz.ai, said that DigitalOcean's services "have been a key part of our infrastructure since day one."
Pricing
DigitalOcean offers a range of pricing options for its cloud hosting services. Here are some key points about DigitalOcean's pricing:
- Pricing is based on a monthly billing cycle. Typically, on the first day of each month, DigitalOcean invoices and automatically charges your account's primary payment method for the previous month's usage. In some cases, DigitalOcean might charge if your usage exceeds a threshold. You can also log in and self-pay the balance at any time.
- Pricing is based on a single Droplet. You may have created additional resources, and this could be the reason for the higher bill. You can check your bill in the control panel to get details on the various resources you are using. If you need help, please contact support.
- Accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. Apple Pay requires a Safari browser. For additional payment options, including wire transfer, purchase orders, and ACH, please contact DigitalOcean. Note that when you add a card, DigitalOcean may send a temporary pre-authorization request to the issuing bank. This pre-authorization charge is immediately released by DigitalOcean but may take a few days to clear from your card depending on the bank.
- Droplets are billed hourly up to a monthly cap of 672 hours (the number of hours in 4 weeks). If you use your server for fewer than 672 hours during the month, you will be billed for each hour that you used. If you use your server for more than 672 hours during the month, you will be billed at the monthly cost, which is capped at 672 hours.
- Offers a range of pricing plans for its Droplets, starting at $5 per month for a Basic plan. The pricing plans vary based on the amount of memory, vCPUs, transfer, and SSD storage that you need.
- App Platform offers a Starter tier that is ideal for trying out the platform and deploying static sites. You can build and deploy 3 static sites for free, and for every additional static site, you would be charged $3.00/month. You also get 1GiB of outbound transfer per month for every static site. If you exceed this usage limit, DigitalOcean may charge you for overages.
All prices you can get by link.
Marketplace and community
DigitalOcean's Marketplace and community are important resources for developers who use DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services. Here are some key points about DigitalOcean's Marketplace:
- Marketplace is a platform where developers can find preconfigured applications and solutions to get up and running quickly.
- The Marketplace offers preconfigured 1-click apps and tools that are designed to work seamlessly with DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services.
- DigitalOcean works closely with partners to deliver a truly seamless experience for users, creating the ability for developers to deploy fully tested app environments with the click of a button.
- Marketplace removes the pain of "dependency hell" by bringing together DigitalOcean's user community and a network of trusted partners whose apps and tools have been carefully vetted for seamless integration and deployment.
- Marketplace offers a range of apps and tools, from application frameworks to blogs and business apps.
DigitalOcean Community:
- Community offers thousands of tutorials, videos, and answers to questions on a wide range of topics.
- The community is built around open-source software and is accessible to everyone, regardless of skill level.
- Community is active on various platforms, including its website, GitHub, and events and conferences.
- Community is praised for its strategy, which includes an online Q&A area for customers to ask for help from their peers.
- DigitalOcean is investing in building a dedicated team to drive community building.
Monitoring and Scaling
Leverage DigitalOcean's monitoring and alerting tools to keep an eye on your resource utilization. This data can help you make informed decisions about when to scale your infrastructure, ensuring that you're only paying for what you need.
Load Balancers
DigitalOcean's Load Balancers distribute traffic across multiple Droplets, ensuring high availability and improved response times. By spreading the load, you prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck.
DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a fully-managed, highly available network load balancing service that distribute traffic to groups of Droplets, which decouples the overall health of a backend service from the health of a single server to ensure that your services stay online
- Automatic SSL certificate provisioning and renewal through Let's Encrypt
- Support for HTTP/3, providing better performance for your users
- Ability to seamlessly add Load Balancers to your DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster
- Highly available, fully-managed service that works right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet
- Ability to distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application’s availability, performance, and reliability at scale
- Ability to control traffic routing with configurable rules that specify the ports and protocols that the load balancer should listen on, as well as the way that it should select and forward requests to the backend servers
- Automatic monitoring of backend pools and only sending requests to Droplets that pass health checks
- Ability to define health check endpoints and set the parameters around what constitutes a healthy response
- Ability to remove Droplets that fail health checks from rotation and add them back when the health checks pass
- Ability to configure a single Load Balancer to handle multiple protocols and ports
- Ability to customize the amount of time a Load Balancer allows HTTP connections to remain idle before closing it
Load Balancers are priced at $12 per month per node, and can be sized to suit your needs. They are easily managed through the Control Panel or API, and can be provisioned in seconds. This is a great solution for developers who need to distribute incoming traffic across their infrastructure to increase their application's availability, performance, and reliability at scale.
Competitors
Here are some of DigitalOcean's competitors and how they compare:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is one of the largest cloud hosting providers in the world, offering a wide range of services and features. AWS is known for its scalability, reliability, and security. However, AWS can be complex and expensive, making it less accessible to smaller businesses and individual developers.
- Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure is known for its security, compliance, and hybrid cloud capabilities. However, Azure can be complex and expensive, making it less accessible to smaller businesses and individual developers.
- Google Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products. Google Cloud Platform is known for its scalability, reliability, and security. However, Google Cloud Platform can be complex and expensive, making it less accessible to smaller businesses and individual developers.
- Vultr: Vultr is a cloud hosting provider that offers a range of services, including virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and cloud storage. Vultr is known for its simplicity, affordability, and high-performance infrastructure. Vultr is a good option for developers who are looking for a simple and affordable cloud hosting solution.
- Linode: Linode is a cloud hosting provider that offers virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and managed Kubernetes services. Linode is known for its simplicity, affordability, and high-performance infrastructure. Linode is a good option for developers who are looking for a simple and affordable cloud hosting solution.
