VPS : DigitalOcean Self-Managed Hosting Review

Welcome to the DigitalOcean Self-Managed hosting review, We will compare this new brand with the all time classic VPS providers on the scale of performance, UI and UX, Customer support and help databases, Pricing and reliability. Beware this is a self-managed VPS host, which means it has cheap dirt prices + very high performance + no assistance + no cPanel. Let’s get started :

Queue DigitalOcean :

If you might have read my previous posts, you’ll see I am very dedicated to vulTr hosting, I use it myself and do recommend it a lot for clients.
Very often I get requirements where a self-managed VPS would suffice, But there should be variety of payment methods supported. Since vulTr is only Credit/PayPal, Whenever I need to setup payment via Debit Cards, Amex, etc, I use DigitalOcean.

Plans And Services of DigitalOcean :

First and foremost are the standard VPS plans which are somewhat similar to other competitors :

A $10 server can host a wordpress website with 25+ plugins and 5k pageviews per days without any problems. Moving on to the other variant of VPS hosts :

Above listed “Optimized Droplets” are useful when you require high-performance setup right-off the first boot and dont have time to fine-tune it yourself. DigitalOcean provides another type of VPS services :

If you are an advanced developer and know what it the bottleneck of your system, You can request a different hardware configuration at the same prices. This feature is indeed something new in the hosting industry and we’d love to see this at different pricing levels !

Payment And Setup :

In their own words :
“…We believe that all pricing models should be straightforward and predictable. That is why all Droplets are billed hourly, up until a monthly cap (672 hours or 28 days) so it’s always February and there are no surprises at the end of the month when you receive your bill – it is that simple.”
DigitalOcean accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Prepaid Cards and PayPal. They have a very nice explanation of what payment methods are good and what are not on their official helpbase.

Customer Service :

Since its a self-managed VPS host, One has to setup, manage and troubleshoot his own system, Their is no [EIG-like] tiered support staff to help you with your wordpress installation. Be sure you are familiar with Linux and punching commands via ssh.
If you can do that, DigitalOcean has a very nicely collected Help & knowledgebase page where you can find the solution to most of your problems.

TL;DR :

Being the newest contender in the self-managed cloud VPS hosts, DigitalOcean has been gaining positive popularity due to its very straight-forward business model, Its hourly billing policy, Quick system initialization and variety of payment methods.
DigitalOcean provides a variety of servers and à-la-carte configuration model, Which is something that can of very use.