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DigitalOcean—A New Amazing Cloud VPS Hosting

by Eugene MelnikovApril 11, 2013
This blog post overview DigitalOcean in terms of usability, speed, pricing, community, etc.

Hi, guys. Today, I wanted to introduce DigitalOcean—a new cheap hosting for your projects. They started at 2011, but became popular just at the beginning of this year. It’s suitable for small and fast-growing projects or temporary demo instances. And I’ll try to explain why.

 

A minute to launch

Really. I tried. It’s much more faster then ask admins to start a new virtual machine, install OS, fight with firewalls, and one more time get disappointed with lack of 80 ports. They gave a dedicated IP for your server and root access, so you can do absolutely anything (except updating kernel due to KVM virtualization).

 

Cheap pricing

It’s cheaper than AWS, Linode, and RackSpace analogs. Just take a look at this comparison. Furthermore, the price starts from $5 per month, and you can opt for billing per hour. So, you can run a demo server just for an hour and pay $0.007.

If you want daily backups, it will cost you 1$ per month (20% of a server price). However, remember that you pay even for the switched off machine. You should make a snapshot ($0.02 per GB) and remove server if you want to stop being charged and save a machine.

 

Speed

DigitalOcean uses SSD hard drives, and you can see the impact. It also features a fast network. Currently, they have run almost 150,000 cloud servers.

 

Easy to use

There is a very simple and clear control panel. You can manage servers, DNS records, SSH keys, snapshots, backups, as well as open a support ticket, check you balance, and recharge an account via a credit card or PayPal. You can also use a simple API that provides almost the same functionality as the control panel, happily for RightScale.

 

An excellent community

At the official website, you can find a lot of tutorials for beginners about initial configuring, balance loading, etc. In addition, there is a forum and even an IRC chat.

 

99.99% uptime

They promise 99.99% uptime around network, power, and virtual server availability. In case something happens, they promise a credit account according to the amount of time the service was unavailable. You can also check out the status page.

 

Customers

jsFiddle and railscasts.com already moved to DigitalOcean. May be it is your turn?

 

Further reading

   
Posted In
Tutorials
Tags
GitHub, Research and Development
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Eugene Melnikov is a senior software engineer at Altoros. He mainly specializes in Ruby and Ruby-based frameworks, as well as in JavaScript development, including Node.js, jQuery, and AngularJS. Working at Altoros, Eugene has also designed and implemented a variety of SQL and NoSQL database solutions. He recently became engaged in creating data-driven software for IoT applications. Check out Eugene's GitHub profile.