DigitalOcean Review & Coupons

This article is a very detailed review of Digital Ocean VPS cloud hosting. Read this DigitalOcean Review to find out if it is a right choice for your VPS hosting needs. DigitalOcean LogoFor those of you who have never heard of DigitalOcean before, it is a relatively new entrant into the world of VPS cloud hosting. DigitalOcean has grown tremendously since its inception and created more than 400,000 VPS cloud servers for its users.

DigitalOcean Review : VPS Feature Highlights and Price Plans

High performance SSD hard drives
KVM virtualization technology
Server network speed at 1Gbps
Dedicated IP addresses
Easy-to-use control panel, almost foolproof
Server snapshots and automatic backup options
Highly scalable, resizing servers with a few clicks
Available DNS management
RESTful API extension
One-Click Installs of WordPress, LAMP, and RoR
Two-factor authentication security
HTML5 enabled full console access via VNC
4 data centers, New York City(NY1 & NY2), San Francisco, and Amsterdam
A large collection of helpful tutorials and an active community
24/7 ticket support, an IRC channel, and a forum
99.99% Uptime SLA
Pay-As-You-Grow, per hour billing, no contract
Credit cards and PayPal accepted

You can have all of the above at a bargain basement price. For just $5 a month without contract, DigitalOcean offers you a KVM based VPS with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of super speedy SSD, and 1TB of monthly transfer. Other monthly plans are available as well, if more system resources are required. Servers can be easily scaled up or down at any time and that can be achieved with just a few clicks. Visit DigitalOcean official website for more information on VPS pricing.

DigitalOcean Review : Control Panel, VPS Creation and One-Click Installs

The sign-up process for a new account is extremely simple. Only an email address and a new account password are required before selecting a payment method on the sign-up page. Major credit cards and PayPal are accepted. No contract is required. You are billed by the hour and pay as you “grow”.

Unlike many other VPS providers, DigitalOcean’s custom control panel is designed with simplicity in mind. To get your first VPS created, all you need to do is select the size of your VPS, the data center location, and the Linux distro of your choice before clicking the “Create Droplet” button. It usually takes less than a minute, as advertised, for a small-sized VPS droplet to become ready to use.

The most popular Linux distros are provided in the control panel for VPS creation. 32bit and 64bit versions of CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Arch Linux are available, and the Ubuntu Desktop ( Xubuntu / Xfce ) and Fedora Desktop are also in the selection list. The officially maintained “One-click Installs” are also available for LAMP, WordPress, Ruby on Rails and Redmine. One-click Installs are the perfect solutions for users who are new to unmanaged Linux hosting. Bloggers who need nothing more than a few WordPress sites will save a lot of time with One-Click Installs as well.

DigitalOcean Review : Data Centers, Private Networking, and IPv6

DigialOcean currently has 4 data centers. They are operated by Equinix, Telx, and TelecityGroup in New York City (NY1 and NY2), San Francisco and Amsterdam Netherlands. DigitalOcean’s newest data center NY2 is in Google’s New York building at 111 8th Avenue. Private networking is in alpha testing at the moment and will premiere in the new NY2 facility very soon. DigitalOcean is investing heavily in its infrastructure. Future expansions will include a Texas location as well as Asia and South America.

IPv6 is not available as of the writing of this DigitalOcean Review, but it has been indicated that this feature will be available by September 1, 2013.

DigitalOcean Review : Scalability

You are allocated more system resources if you choose to create a larger VPS. If you already have a VPS in use and want to upgrade (or downgrade) the RAM and CPU cores instantly, you can always do a “Fast-Resize” on your VPS. That can be achieved with just a few clicks on the control panel. Support tickets are not necessary at all and the system downtime required for that is minimal.

If you would like to do some pre-production testing for a new website or application, you can always spin up a small size server to do all the tests you want and the cost for that will be less than a cent per hour.

DigitalOcean Review : VPS Performance

As a part of this DigitalOcean Review, we tested the performance of 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB VPS droplets with UnixBench. Unlike the usually oversold OpenVZ solutions, DigitalOcean’s KVM based virtualization guarantees the allocated CPU and RAM resources. The lightening fast SSD disks are a big help in improving overall performance, as already evident during the creation process of a fresh VPS. The following are some of our actual test results.

On our 1GB VPS:

System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0   29181066.6   2500.5
Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0       3364.8    611.8
Execl Throughput                                 43.0       3080.7    716.4
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0     970605.7   2451.0
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0     275813.5   1666.5
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0    1765632.4   3044.2
Pipe Throughput                               12440.0    1666863.1   1339.9
Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0     250412.6    626.0
Process Creation                                126.0       9697.9    769.7
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4       4901.2   1155.9
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0        703.4   1172.3
System Call Overhead                          15000.0    2173421.8   1448.9
                                                                   ========
System Benchmarks Index Score                                        1268.0

On our smallest 512MB VPS:

System Benchmarks Index Score                             910.1

On our largest 2GB VPS:

System Benchmarks Index Score                             1603.4

The test scores published in this DigitalOcean Review are our first hand experience on NY1 droplets.

DigitalOcean Review : Data Backup and Recovery Options

DigitalOcean provides its users with two types of mechanism for data backup and recovery. Snapshots of your DigitalOcean instance can be manually taken at any point in time and that requires your VPS be offline for just a minute or two. Automatic backups are done periodically and without the need of bringing your servers down.

The costs for snapshots and backups are very reasonable. Automatic backups for the least expensive server configuration cost just a dollar per month.

DigitalOcean Review : Tech Support, Document Library and the Community

DigitalOcean’s technical support is superb. Tickets are usually answered in a matter of minutes. The technical support people are friendly and eager to help. An IRC channel is officially maintained for users who are interested in participating in real time chat. There is a network status website hosted on a separate domain.

DigitalOcean maintains a large number of tutorials on its website. Basic steps, such as creating your VPS droplets, setting up IP tables, installing MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python, RoR, and Apache, or even Nginx, are very well documented. Linux first-timers can just rely on those step-by-step guides to get a website or an application up and running easily. The tutorials are up-to-date and easy to follow. Comments are allowed so readers can interact with the writers or the huge DigitalOcean community if they have questions. There is a forum where users can exchange ideas as well.

DigitalOcean Review : DigitalOcean vs Linode

DigitalOcean beats most cheap VPS competitors hands down with its superior combination of SSD, KVM and a long list of other features. However, it is absolutely not just competing in the low end server market. In fact, the comparison chart on its official website only includes competitors like Linode, Amazon, and Rackspace.

For $20 a month, DigitalOcean offers twice the RAM, much faster disks, a lot more included monthly transfer, and much cheaper extra transfer than Linode, although Linode’s CPU is slightly more powerful. DigitalOcean has some useful features that are totally missing from Linode: Per hour billing for VPS usage, accepting PayPal as a payment method, and integrated One-Click Installs of LAMP, WordPress, RoR, etc.

For those who prefer fast disk IO speeds, choosing DigitalOcean as oppose to Linode is a no-brainer. We have conducted performance comparison tests and the results indicated that DigitalOcean’s SSDs are 3 to 5 times faster than the competitor’s spinning drives.

DigitalOcean Review : Conclusion

We like what DigitalOcean has to offer at a price that can’t be beat: KVM, high performance SSD, tier-1 bandwidth, a simple yet powerful control panel with a long list of features, excellent scalability, and superb support. We are now using DigitalOcean for all of our web development projects and we have recommended it to many of our clients. DigitalOcean is not just a budget VPS provider, it offers a great value for money.

DigitalOcean’s official website: www.digitalocean.com