VPS DigitalOcean review pros & cons

VPS DigitalOcean Pros

• Unlike most VPS providers, the DigitalOcean’s control panel is basically designed with simplicity in-mind. To get your 1st VPS created, all you’ve to do is choose the size of the VPS, a data center-location, and your preferred Linux distro before you click the “Create a Droplet” button. It normally takes a minute or less for a small sized VPS-droplet to get ready to use. The most popular-Linux distros are usually provided in the custom control panel. 64bit and 32bit versions of Arch linux, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian are available, also the Fedora Desktop and the Ubuntu Desktop are in the selection-list. The officially maintained “One click Installs” are available for Redmine, LAMP, Docker, WordPress and Ruby on Rails. One click-Installs are a perfect solution for users who’re new to unmanaged Linux-hosting. Also any blogger who needs just a few WordPress websites will save lots of time with the One Click-Installs. Currently, DigialOcean has four data centers. They’re operated by Telx, Equinix, and TelecityGroup in Netherlands, New York and San Francisco. DigitalOcean’s newest data-center is in Google’s (NY2) New York building at 111-8th Avenue.

• DigitalOcean provides users with 2 types of mechanisms for data recovery and backup. Snapshots of the DigitalOcean-instance can be easily manually taken at anytime and it requires the VPS be offline-for a minute or 2. Automatic back-ups are usually done periodically and with no need of bringing the servers down. The costs for backups and snapshots are quite reasonable. Automatic back-ups for the least-expensive server configuration normally costs just a dollar/month.

• DigitalOcean’s technical-support is brilliant. There are many tutorials, there’s a forum, they’ve a blog and there’s an IRC-channel. The IRC and the forums are very helpful, the site’s blog is very informative and all of the tutorials are good for all new users and serve as a great reference for all experienced users. Any tickets submitted are always answered in just a few minutes. Their technical support are always friendly and ever eager to help. The IRC channel is maintained for all users who’re interested in engaging in real-time chat.

• Cheap. For just 5 dollars you will get an SSD based-VM with 512-MB RAM, 20-GB disk space and 1-TB of transfer. Most of the other VPS-providers that exist at around this price range aren’t nearly as good as VPS DigitalOcean. For just $20 per month, DigitalOcean provides twice the RAM, with much faster disks and lots more is included in the monthly transfer.

• DigitalOcean beats many other VPS competitors hands-down with its uber superior combination of KVM, SSD, and a list of many other features.

VPS DigitalOcean Cons

• It doesn’t have as much raw CPU power as Linode. If you normally do lots of encoding, DigitalOcean may slow you, but for those who normally prefer a fast disk IO-performance and a larger memory size DigitalOcean is the choice for you.

• DigitalOcean doesn’t have a SAN. It uses a local storage in RAID-5, when more than 1 disk fails you may experience a long day.

• DigitalOcean does not offer Windows-VPSes. If you want to run windows-applications on the server, you probably need to look somewhere else.

• They still do not have IPv6.

• You can’t install the system by yourself, or provide/give your own ISO.