DigitalOcean Cloud Hosting Review
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers. It was founded in 2011 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky. Only after 3 years, in October 2014, DigitalOcean surpassed Rackspace as the fourth largest hosting provider in the world. The company leases capacity from existing data centres, including sites in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, London, Singapore and Frankfurt.
DigitalOcean created the fastest and one of the most convenient cloud technology to help you easily and more efficiently manage your infrastructure so you can get back to coding. They provide all of their users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, flexible API, and the ability to select to nearest data centre location.
Speed and reliability - We’ve selected London location for our website, but you’re more than welcome to choose whichever you like, and it will usually come down to your own nearest location, all of the locations provide great speeds to the whole world. We have pinged our website (WordPress Droplet) from Amsterdam, Netherlands and London, UK and the results were very impressive - 8.2ms from Amsterdam (the website is faster than 99% of all tested websites) and 2.4ms from London. To increase your website load from all over the world, you can simply transfer a copy of your Droplet snapshot to all regions (London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York, London and Singapore). DigitalOcean provides a 99.99% uptime SLA around network, power and virtual server availability. If they fail to deliver, they will credit you based on the amount of time that service was unavailable.
Security - Cloud hosting keeps your content safe. By distributing server data across redundant servers, information hosted in the cloud is protected against hardware failure. Automated backups and snapshots ensure that server content stays safe and up-to-date. As a result none of DigitalOcean technical support staff have any access to your back-end hypervisors, where virtual servers reside nor direct access to the NAS/SAN storage systems where snapshots and backup images reside, only the engineering team has a direct access to the backend servers.Each datacenter is staffed 24/7/365 with onsite security and to protect against unauthorized entry, with security cameras, biometric readers for access and at least two-factor authentication to gain access to the facilities.
Snapshots and Backups (images) are stored on an internal non-publicly visible network on NAS/SAN servers. Customers can manage directly in how many regions their snapshots exist which allows customers to increase the redundancy of the files that are stored in the backend.
Distributions & One-Click Install Apps - Choose your favorite Linux distribution (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) or install your favorite application (Django, Docker, Dokku, Drone, Drupal, ELK, FreeBSD, AMP, Ghost, GitLab, Joomla, LAMP, LEMP, Magento, MEAN, MediaWiki, MongoDB, Node.js, ownCloud, Redmine, Ruby on Rails, WordPress and more) with the simple click of a button. When creating a Droplet, click on the Applications tab and be live on a cloud server in less than a minute.
Support - The weakest point in our opinion. DigitalOcean provides only one type of support - through DigitalOcean Support System, which in any cases is not appropriate. They don't have live chat support and phone support.
Technical
- High performance SSD hard drives
- KVM virtualization technology, guaranteed system resources
- Server network speed at 1Gbps
- Dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
- Private networking available
- Easy-to-use control panel, almost foolproof
- Server snapshots and automatic backup options
- One-Click Installs of WordPress, Joomla, LAMP, and RoR
- Digital Ocean provides a 99.99% Uptime SLA. Lost time is refunded back to your account at the hourly rate incurred.
- 10 data centres - London,3 in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, 3 in New York, San Francisco and Singapore
- Available DNS management
- We didn't find any
Support
- 24/7 technical support through ticket system
- Email support
- Ask the DigitalOcean Community
- Don't have live chat support
- Don't have phone support
Pricing
- Pay only for what you use
- Very cheap, compared to other cloud hosting solutions, starts from 5 $/mo.
- 30 Days Free Trial
- The prices are in dollars
From the very beginning
Besides providing great services at reasonable prices, DigitalOcean makes the everything easy and simple. It takes us totally 6 minutes to sign up, add funds to our account, create a droplet and launch a WordPress site. Make sure you click the pictures for more detailed view.
How to signup to DigitalOcean
It’s incredibly easy to open up an account with DigitalOcean, just enter an email address, and a password you would like to use, the rest of the details will be emailed to you.
You can connect your Twitter and Github accounts with DigitalOcean, they will only use this information to verify your account.
DigitalOcean Payment Methods
You can use a credit card, a U.S. bank account or prepay through PayPal. You’re never paying for a full month, only for the amount of resources you use, this also makes it very easy to create new droplets for testing purposes.
We added $5 to our account and we are ready to create our first Droplet. Just click on the big green button on the right top corner of the website.
Creating our first Droplet
Step 1 - choose a Droplet Hostname and pick the size of the droplet you’d like to have.
Step 2 - select the region you’d like your server to appear in. We picked London for your test website.
Step 3 - select an server image. Choose your favorite Linux distribution (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) or install your favorite application (Django, Docker, Dokku, Drone, Drupal, ELK, FreeBSD, AMP, Ghost, GitLab, Joomla, LAMP, LEMP, Magento, MEAN, MediaWiki, MongoDB, Node.js, ownCloud, Redmine, Ruby on Rails, WordPress and more) with the simple click of a button. We clicked one of the DigitalOcean Applications (Pre-built Images) WordPress on 14.04.
You’ll get the root password in your email address, literally a few seconds after you click the big, green button "Create Droplet". You will see on the picture some "Available settings":
Private Networking: Enables a private networking interface, in addition to the default public interface. IPv6: Enables IPv6. Enables Backups: Enables backups of the droplet. Enable User Data: Enables you to pass arbitrary data into the user-data key of the DigitalOcean Metadata service.DigitalOcean Account Dashboard
As you can see, we have only one droplet with IP address 46.101.43.227, 1GB Memory, Ram30GB SSD Disk, London Region, running on 1Ubuntu WordPress on 14.04.
The green light indicates that the droplet is active.
In this section, you can easily manage your Snapshots, Backups or already Destroyed Droplets. You can also create an image from any powered-down Droplet.
Within the DNS section, click on Add Domain, and fill in the the domain name field and IP address of the server you want to connect it to on the subsequent page.
Note: The domain name does not have a WWW at the beginning.
If you are setting up your name servers on your domain registration – DigitalOcean's Name Servers are:
ns1.digitalocean.com | ns2.digitalocean.com | ns3.digitalocean.com
The DigitalOcean API allows you to manage Droplets and resources within the DigitalOcean cloud in a simple, programmatic way using conventional HTTP requests.The endpoints are intuitive and powerful, allowing you to easily make calls to retrieve information or to execute actions.
All of the functionality that you are familiar with in the DigitalOcean control panel is also available through the API, allowing you to script the complex actions that your situation requires.
It is very easy to open a support ticket, give DigitalOcean team all the details and they will help you resolve the issue as quickly as they can.
Or simply ask the DigitalOcean Community. It’s an active group of smart developers who can help you get the most out of your DigitalOcean experience.
DigitalOcean Droplet Dashboard
From your DigitalOcean Droplet Dashboard, you can manage your droplets:
- Power off your droplet - Note: that when you power off your droplet you are still billed for it
- Power Cycle or hard resetting your server
- Droplet Resize - Permanent or Flexible
- Take a Snapshots or restore from Snapshots - Snapshots (manual backup) can provide an easy way to scale out a system: you can take a snapshot of a current server and spin up a new droplet from the snapshot. It will cost you 20% of the cost of the virtual server
- From the Setting menu, you can enable "Private Network", "Public IPv6 Network"; update your configuration; boot your kernel into a recovery safe mode so that you can perform actions such as fsck the harddrive if it is in a dirty state or simply rename your Hostname
- Graph menu - you can view detailed statistics of your used bandwidth, disc or CPU
- View your droplet history
- You can rebuild or destroy your droplet
Test results
The first and probably most important tool is Ping test:
Ping allows you to to test the reachability of a host and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer.
Check-host results show a super fast ping from the UK - 2.3ms
Pingdom test for speed performance from their Sweeden server.
As you can see, the WordPress website loaded 99% faster than the other tested sites with 99/100 performance grade.
The loading time of the website was 347 ms. We will test it again later with fully working website.
A stress test from LoadImpact helps determine the capability of handling a certain amount of users (load) on your website. The goal is to see how your website will perform when subjected to both an expected and stressful amount of load.
Even with 25 users browsing through our website, the load time is equal (1.3s) to all of them.
Those are some very good indications.
Conclusion
DigitalOcean is clearly a great and cheap way to start your website in the world of cloud computing. They provide KVM, high performance SSD, tier-1 bandwidth, a simple yet powerful control panel which allows you to expand in case your website grows.
DigitalOcean's servers are deployed within less than a minute, you can choose from several locations around the world and everything is easy and simple with their 1-click install system.
For now we are not using DigitalOcean for our web development projects but we will definitely in the near future.
You can also check the other Top UK web hosting companies, reviews and comparison here.
- Performance (5/10)
- Support (5/10)
- Price (4.5/10)
- Reliability (5/10)
- User Friendly (5/10)
- 10/10Performance
- 10/10Support
- 9/10Price
- 10/10Reliability
- 10/10User Friendly
- 0/10Performance
- 0/10Support
- 0/10Price
- 0/10Reliability
- 0/10User Friendly
my money is gone...... no refund
