DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
GoDaddy supported container management and container-as-a-service products, including (since 2016) ElasticHosts and Springs.io (e.g. Elastic Containers), are discontinued under those brands as of June 2020. However, GoDaddy development services, SDKs, and other projects are now hosted at GoDaddy Engineering and some are available open source.
Springs.io is unlike other cloud hosting providers. Our reactive servers dynamically resize based on demand, and you only pay for your consumption, not your provisioning. This means you can save money and not sacrifice performance.
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
There are no regions available on South America.
They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
It would be nice to see that expanded out to more distributions. What would be potentially even better though is templates. Some hosts can deploy ready-to-run WordPress/Drupal sites, LAMP instances, ownCloud instances, etc. at the drop of a hat. If Springs could replicate this with their container hosting they’d immediately appeal to a much, much wider audience;
With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.
DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
In the beginning I wasn’t sure what I should set it to for my web server, so I left it. After a while the Average usage area begins showing how much resource the container is demanding and from that more adequate limits can be set.
Springs is drastically cheaper than running 4 OVH servers, and a little cheaper than running nano instances on AWS.