Category Archives: Reviews

Digital Ocean VPS hosting review

Digital Ocean(DO) is a company that provides easy to set-up SSD-powered virtual private servers(VPS). It’s been growing ever since it’s launch back in 2011.

DO is primarily targeted at developers, system admins, or generally people with some experience administering a server. However if you’re willing to learn and are not scared of command-line use and are not going to host very important stuff as you learn you should totally try out DO. It has a great deal of articles that will guide you through setting-up various environments step-by-step

There are a couple of factors that make DO notable among it’s competitors(like Amazon AWS for instance):

  • Blazing-fast set-up
    You can create a new server in about a minute!
  • Ease of use
    The control panel for managing all of your servers is incredibly simple – you can perform basic tasks, like creating a back-up, keeping note of some statistics, etc.
  • Affordability
    The cheapest VPS that comes(at the moment of writing this article) with 512 MB RAM, 1 processor, 20 GB SSD storage, 1 TB transfer costs only $5 per month!

Combine the above with quite a few coupon codes that can give you 1 to 2 months free VPS hosting for you to try out, you get a pretty nice deal.

Of course nothing in this world is perfect. Here are the things I’ve noticed that can definitely be improved:

  • More statistics
    While I do appreciate the simplicity of the management panel, at least a graph of memory usage would not hurt. Also maybe a quick overview of available disk space.
  • Easier re-sizing
    The current re-sizing method only allows you to increase the computing resources of your server(also called fast-resize). While sometimes that is all you need, in other situations you would also want to get more storage room. And if that’s your case, you have to take a snapshot of your server, create a new server from that snapshot, adjust your DNS settings to point to the new IP, wait for the changes to propagate and then destroy your old server. Pretty clumsy.
  • Better issue notifications
    While usually you would be notified(either as a message in the server management screen, or as an email), sometimes you have to contact support after you notice that something is not working properly for them to tell you that it’s an issue they’re currently working on – that just wastes the time of both parties.

And of course there are some other relatively small issues, but those are the things that I found a bit annoying.

Other than that – support is pretty good, there are plenty of server distributions and a handful of server application images that you can create your server with(like a GitLab server for instance). As with any other VPS, you can do pretty much whatever you want on your server(as long as you’re not violating their ToS).

So – if you’re looking for a new VPS solution, why not go over to Digital Ocean and start your server in a matter of minutes. If you want to show some appreciation, I would love for you to use my referral link to register your account – https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=1ba577bd79ab . Otherwise, you can just go to their site – https://www.digitalocean.com/ and set-up your account.