# What's the difference between DigitalOcean and other VPS companies?



## raindog308 (Feb 23, 2014)

I've never bought from DigitalOcean - plenty of good budget and premium VPS companies, as well as good cloud companies (AWS, Azure, etc.)

I looked at them today...so other than you can choose to pay by the month or by the hour, what's the difference between DO and any other VPS company?


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## Nett (Feb 23, 2014)

Good company, good support, nice control panel, owned IP space, etc. The VPS is not very different.


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## D. Strout (Feb 23, 2014)

There are several things that DigitalOcean does differently. None of them stand out too much on their own, but together the combination does stand out. First is hourly billing. Spin up an instance real quick for testing, spin it down two hours later, one cent. If you do keep it up for a whole month, the charge is automatically adjusted to $5, so it's not like you really "choose" what billing period you want.

Second thing is simplicity. You may have seen DO's ads on YouTube - they poke fun at companies that have too many choices. Amazon EC2 comes to mind (though obviously they don't call them out by name). Instead of generating keys, selecting a type of instance, checking in to IP and bandwidth pricing charts, you have a simple structure. $5/month for a 512MB VPS, $10 for 1GB and so on, with other resources being adjusted as necessary.

A few other things that they offer are nice coupons to (new) customers, pure SSD storage by default, free snapshots and inexpensive backups, and fast support. All together, it's a winning combination for me.

Some weaknesses of their setup include lack of IPv6 (though a tunnel from HE.net adds very little latency), and only one IPv4 address per server. This is doubtless in an effort to maintain simplicity, which is understandable. If you need those things, DigitalOcean is not for you.


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## notFound (Feb 23, 2014)

Hourly billing is the only key difference, the custom control panel and simplicity is also attractive but many VPS companies have that too.. And then the price is quite attractive when combined with the word 'cloud'.


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## tonyg (Feb 23, 2014)

Not to mention their VPS perform much better than most others...in my limited testing/usage only, RamNode and BuyVM have faster VPSs.


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## bdtech (Feb 23, 2014)

DO is not comparable to AWS. DO is targeted cheap VPS for "developers" not business/corporate customers. Reminds me of slicehost


IMO there's only one company that bridges the gap between DO and AWS - Linode. Read their nextgen blog posts especially on the network


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## DomainBop (Feb 23, 2014)

> What's the difference between DigitalOcean and other VPS companies?


The one, and only, thing that sets them apart from other VPS providers is they have a NY Tech Meetup "made in NY" logo on their home page.



> First is hourly billing.


iwStack, Nephoscale, CloudVPS (in beta), and several other true cloud providers (i.e. providers with H/A, failover, don't use RAID 5 local storage) also offer hourly billing



> pure SSD storage by defaul


long list of VPS providers with that feature



> Second thing is simplicity.


long list of VPS providers with that setup choice too...the fact that AWS and other true cloud providers have a more complicated setup is really irrelevant because Digital Ocean is a VPS provider with a fondness for using the term "cloud" in their marketing materials but they're not a true cloud provider.


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## drmike (Feb 23, 2014)

Digitalocean much like Choopa's Vultur offering are basically many location VPS companies with their own custom panel.  The have public APIs that allow for interesting automation for advanced customers.  Hourly billing is nice touch especially when you are a tinkerer like me and roll VPS instances, test things, then redeploy cleanly.

Aside from these points, they are glorified VPS instances.  Certainly not cloud instances.


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## Francisco (Feb 23, 2014)

raindog308 said:


> I've never bought from DigitalOcean - plenty of good budget and premium VPS companies, as well as good cloud companies (AWS, Azure, etc.)
> 
> I looked at them today...so other than you can choose to pay by the month or by the hour, what's the difference between DO and any other VPS company?


A few million dollars in venture money and marketing capital?

The big thing is that they threw free money at a lot of people in hopes of turning them into long term consumers. In reality, I wouldn't doubt there is users that have never paid an actual invoice and just migrate their data between instances and make new accounts.

Supposedly there's no active promo's in play but I figure within a few months they'll throw another $10 out. It's possible they're done their marketing campaign (do you still see youtube ads for them?) and so they're not going to do some for a while.

Will the lack of coupons hurt them? Maybe a bit.

Feature wise there's lots of providers that offer far more.

Francisco


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## drmike (Feb 23, 2014)

Francisco said:


> The big thing is that they threw free money at a lot of people in hopes of turning them into long term consumers. In reality, I wouldn't doubt there is users that have never paid an actual invoice and just migrate their data between instances and make new accounts.


I signed up with DigitalOcean on a promo code where they gave a bulk of credit for becoming new customer, required a token validation and deposit.  So I probably gave them $10 or $20.

In big picture, talking about a 512MB VPS fulltime deployed and several others I use for testing as-needed.   

So in essence, consuming $6-8 a month for that.   In cheap terms, that's real money.   I could buy at least 2 full time OpenVZ instances of same size and with more disk space.

For me, DO rocks as I can allocate things when needed.   No silly order process delays and validation stuff thereafter.  I need another instance I just create it and wait a few minutes tops.   It's compelling for developers 

That $10 or $20 tallied oh, north of $50... $50 will cover 8-12 months of billing depending on usage.  It's decent cost/expensive in some markets for a 512MB VPS.

If others want to bring KVM and Xen 512MB chunks on decent networks at $5 month or ideally less, yeah, I'd buy.


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## tchen (Feb 23, 2014)

It kinda fits the usage case I've had lately of spinning up nodes to test Chef/ansible deployment scripts.  The API helps getting a clean provision up and running with minimal fuss.  That opens the door to using it, and given that its relatively cheap enough compared to other pure VPS providers, there's less friction to just leaving the production deployment in DO's backyard.


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## D. Strout (Feb 23, 2014)

@DomainBop See the second sentence of my post:



D. Strout said:


> There are several things that DigitalOcean does differently. None of them stand out too much on their own, but together the combination does stand out.


Yeah, other providers do each of the things I listed, but DO brings them together in a very user-friendly way that lends itself perfectly to quick and easy use. That and the marketing and coupons. But they've made me in to a long term customer with those, so I'd say that's another score in their favor.


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## MannDude (Feb 24, 2014)

One thing I love about DigitalOcean, and I wish more providers had this function, is I can deploy a new VM and have my SSH Key added to it as it's provisioned. That's a little thing that I've found to be quite convenient.

I've not played with their other features, but that one I do enjoy.


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## serverian (Feb 24, 2014)

Francisco said:


> A few million dollars in venture money and marketing capital?


This. Give a fraction of that money to a company like BuyVM and see what happens.


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## Nett (Feb 24, 2014)

serverian said:


> This. Give a fraction of that money to a company like BuyVM and see what happens.



They use the money and provide free credits to clients, rather than focusing more on keeping them paying.


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## Francisco (Feb 24, 2014)

Nett said:


> They use the money and provide free credits to clients, rather than focusing more on keeping them paying.


That's how they market. They have ads and such that run but the majority is in credits.

As I said, lets see when their coupons next come up. It may come up any day now and rinse/repeat.

As Mao says, and many others, though, there is countless users that don't pay a dime to them and just

migrate between accounts to get credit. Sure, they might have to spend a few dollars on an initial

deposit, but $5 in, get $50 out? OK...



serverian said:


> This. Give a fraction of that money to a company like BuyVM and see what happens.


I'd find something else to give our users for free probably 

Francisco


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## ChrisM (Feb 24, 2014)

Francisco said:


> I'd find something else to give our users for free probably
> 
> 
> Francisco



Free beer?


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## Nett (Feb 24, 2014)

Francisco said:


> I'd find something else to give our users for free probably


Digitalocean gives free swags sometimes.


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## peterw (Feb 24, 2014)

DigitalOcean provides a good API. You can manage everything with your own software. No other company is providing such a good API for virtual servers.


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## thuvienvps (Feb 24, 2014)

DO: downs today (Singapore DC)

Others: up


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## lbft (Feb 24, 2014)

peterw said:


> DigitalOcean provides a good API. You can manage everything with your own software. No other company is providing such a good API for virtual servers.


I'm not sure I'd say that - AWS's APIs are exhaustive to the point of being intimidating.


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## GIANT_CRAB (Feb 24, 2014)

The main difference is that DO isn't a summer host.

#REKT


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## dano (Feb 24, 2014)

DO has improved much in the last few years, but I would say there is not much difference in DO and the better VPS companies that are out there today. For example, in the start, I emailed DO and let them know what I was thinking. as I had done similar with appfog in their infant days also - DO ceo email me back and thanked me for my input and let me know what they were doing to fix it and maybe some things that hadn't considered.

At the start though, they were just like any other "descent" vps company, and really, there were many better brands out there for vps that were on LEB. Fast forward a couple of years and millions of dollars poured into DO, and they have a better platform now, and have done lots to get the attention of AWS, which could be an advantage to the end user.

I currently do not have a DO account/machine.


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## RockTBN (Feb 24, 2014)

DO was my first choice when linux VPS come to mind. Hourly billing, good automated system, pure SSD & solid network. I could not expect more than that.


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