[Darth-Apple]

DigitalOcean is a fairly large provider/host that offers virtual servers (virtual machines on a rack server) for good prices. You get much more resources and better scalability than you do on shared hosting. On shared hosting, once your website gets busy, they email you and ask you to upgrade, or they suspend you. On VPS hosting, you generally get much more resources allotted to you, and if you run out, you'll know exactly where the limit is and can upgrade long before that happens. 

It's generally much more flexible, powerful, and scalable. 

Anyway, I've always used Ramnode. They're awesome and have great prices and reliability, but they have some vague CPU usage policies that are a little limiting and intimidating. In short, using more than one core (even if you bought four) is considered "abuse" unless it's for short bursts. Nobody is really sure if a "burst" is one hour, or an evening. I've never once run into an issue with Ramnode, but as we grow, I'm a little concerned about how vague the policy is. 

DigitalOcean doesn't seem to do that, or at least is much more specific about it. I already have a new server for MS that is in the process of being set up (on Ramnode), but I saw some good ones on DigitalOcean and I've been considering it. Anyone have experience with them?

[Lain]

I used to use them for small projects back when my GitHub education pack offered it (it still does, if you want a code just let me know, good for about 10 months with a 5$ droplet)

Never had any issues with them. Not nearly as secure as AWS is by default where you need to generate a keypair and use that, and once you lose that keypair you're locked out. Instead, it sends a (plaintext) temp password for you to log into the droplet with SSH, then on first login prompts you to set up a new password.

So security-wise, it's not as rigid for authentication.

But hey. It's a cheap box and has great uptime. Their support documents are miles better than AWS IMO and everything is pretty easy to use overall. Haven't really gotten deep into it in terms of cloud services and microservices and whatever the f***, but overall it's worked for basic hosting pretty well.

[Darth-Apple]

Glad to hear you've had positive experiences.

I have quite a bit of AWS experience for a contracting job I do on the side. I set up a big cloud of 12 instances with them last year. It all worked out very well for us, never had an issue at all. However, they charge a TON for bandwidth. Like, it's insane how much they charge, and sadly that's the norm for cloud hosting. We host images here and don't use that much (about 50GB/month on average), but that's enough to where it would cost me a lot more just hosting that on AWS.

Ramnode throws in 2TB just for having a VPS with them. I'm not about to pay $200 for the same bandwidth on AWS.

I might set up a test box and see how it goes. I can get two cores, 3TB of bandwidth, 60GB of SSD, and 2GB of RAM for $15, and they seem to have reasonable policies to go with it.

[s3_gunzel]

I have had no issues with Digital Ocean. We were customers of theirs in the day. Before we moved to an ESXi box. Turned out, having 20 droplets got very expensive.

[Darth-Apple]

That's a lot of droplets...

How was their general CPU performance?

[s3_gunzel]

How was their general CPU performance?

Perfectly reasonable. There were no issues, and we had no complaints.

[Darth-Apple]

How was their general CPU performance?

Perfectly reasonable. There were no issues, and we had no complaints.

Awesome. I'm looking into it. Not quite a VDS, but they seem to have more reasonable CPU usage policies at least.

[Divya165]

I don't have any idea about that but I'm using bodHOST dedicated server hosting.