DigitalOcean Review
DigitalOcean in its own words
DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. As of January 2018, DigitalOcean was the third-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers. DigitalOcean also marked its presence in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 List in 2018.
DigitalOcean was founded as a VPS provider in 2012.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.
- Canada
- Germany
- India
- Netherlands
- Singapore
- United Kingdom
- United States
Quick Links
| DigitalOcean plans specs and prices | Plans |
| DigitalOcean instance types | Instance Types |
| How fast are DigitalOcean servers? Check them out in the Screener | Screener |
| List of DigitalOcean trials | Trials |
| Review CPU models found in DigitalOcean trials | CPUs |
| Performance variations of DigitalOcean VPS over the long term | Consistency |
| List of DigitalOcean yabs.sh results | Yabs |
DigitalOcean VPS Features
Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.
Pros and Cons
Strengths
- Numerous datacenter locations.
- Modern, intuitive and fast UI.
- Large catalog of cloud services.
Weaknesses
- Slowish performance on average.
DigitalOcean Extra Services
In addition to features included in VPS plans, DigitalOcean also offers the following services (possibly for a fee):
| Backups | Block storage | Object storage | Load balancer |
| Floating IP addresses | Team Management | Managed databases | Serverless |
| DDoS protection | Kubernetes | GPU instances | Private network |
VPS Instance Provisioning Time
For each DigitalOcean VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.
See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.
| Average Provisioning Time | Min Provisioning Time | Max Provisioning Time | Number of VPS Samples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 42s | 40s | 45s | 2 |
Control Panel Screenshots
Cloud Storage Prices
For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.
| Storage Type | Price / GB / month | Description | Restriction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block | $0.100 |
Volumes are encrypted at rest, replicated multiple times and can be resized live.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/block-storage/ |
|
| Snapshots | $0.050 |
Snapshots are created on users requests and are images of block storage disk volumes.
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/snapshots/ |
|
| Object | $0.020 |
Object storage is called "Spaces" at DO. $5 for 250GB/month that include 1TB of outbound transfer (CDN included) https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ |
250GB minimum |
| Backups | $0.050 |
Prices vary depending on droplet size: backups are 20% of droplet total price. Therefore backup prices are considerably more expansive on General Purpose droplets. When backups are enabled, DO will create a disk image of the droplet once per week and will keep it for 4 weeks. https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/backups/ |
Prices vary depending on droplet monthly price. |
Network Bandwidth Prices
These are the network bandwidth prices charged by DigitalOcean for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.
For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.
| Description | Price / GB |
|---|---|
|
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged
(the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 4 TB / month
(for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Transfer pool: yes
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/
|
$0.010/GB |
This provider offers the following promotion:
Sign up using the following link and get $200 credit over 60 days.
Value: $200
DigitalOcean Instance Types and Plans
All DigitalOcean instance types
Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.
| Plan | Number of CPU cores | RAM | Storage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Family: Basic Instance Type: Regular |
Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU. |
|||
| Basic Regular 1GB 1 core | 1 | 1.0GB | 25GB | $6.00 / month |
| Basic Regular 2GB 1 core | 1 | 2.0GB | 50GB | $12.00 / month |
| Basic Regular 4GB 2 cores | 2 | 4.0GB | 80GB | $24.00 / month |
| Family: Basic Instance Type: Premium Intel |
Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU. |
|||
| Basic Premium Intel 4GB 2cores | 2 | 4.0GB | 80GB | $28.00 / month |
| Family: Basic Instance Type: Premium AMD |
Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads that underuse dedicated threads. They’re ideal for bursty applications that can handle variable levels of CPU. |
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| Basic Premium AMD 1GB 1core | 1 | 1.0GB | 25GB | $7.00 / month |
| Basic Premium AMD 4GB 2cores | 2 | 4.0GB | 80GB | $28.00 / month |
| Family: General purpose Instance Type: General Purpose Droplets |
General Purpose Droplets have a balanced ratio of memory to dedicated CPU, suitable for a wide variety of production workloads. They’re best for general purpose workloads that require dedicated computer power. |
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| General Purpose 2 cores | 2 | 8.0GB | 50GB | $68.00 / month |
| Family: Compute optimized Instance Type: CPU-Optimized Droplets Regular |
CPU-Optimized Droplets provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. This configuration is optimal for applications that demand fast, consistent performance from dedicated vCPUs, but are not so memory-intensive that they require the additional RAM provided by General Purpose Droplets. |
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| CPU Optimized 4GB | 2 | 4.0GB | 50GB | $47.00 / month |
| Family: Memory optimized Instance Type: |
Memory-optimized Droplets provide 8GB RAM for each vCPU. The additional memory can help you avoid excessively swapping to disk or getting out-of-memory errors, both of which significantly impact your application's performance and stability. |
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| VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet. | ||||
| Family: Compute Optimized Instance Type: CPU-Optimized Droplets Premium Intel |
CPU-Optimized Droplets provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. This configuration is optimal for applications that demand fast, consistent performance from dedicated vCPUs, but are not so memory-intensive that they require the additional RAM provided by General Purpose Droplets. |
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| VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet. | ||||