(this is a edited version of my 30 day review - it's now a 3 month review)
When I first started looking at Cloud hosting, I did quickly hear about two services, iwStack.com and DigitalOcean. Three months ago I did signup for an account with DO, and have used their Amsterdam 2 DC since that. As always I started with a small VPS plan, to test uptime, network, hardware etc. Here is my review of DigitalOcean.
Product/hardware/price
DigitalOcean is not really a cloud host, but they offer cloud features like pay by the hour, snapshots, templates, quick deployment, use your credit to create lots of servers, backups, several locations etc. But still, you get a “normal” KVM server. They have no High Availability, no Fail-Over, no Own ISO, no External Firewall with GUI etc like iwStack do.
But still, they have a really good product. It’s super simple to create new droplets, it takes only around 55 seconds before it is online (you get the root password on e-mail). In fact, it only takes around 55 seconds to create a 64 GB RAM, 640 GB SSD disk, 20vCore KVM server! What other host let you do that?
Their prices starts at $5/mo or $0.007/hour. You pay for what you use, and they do only bill by the hour. But they do charge you 100% regardless of your servers is turned on or off. Still, you can create a template, and delete your server, then recreate it later on when you need it, without paying for it. Unlike iwStack.com, they do not charge for template disk space.
I’m normally using a 512 MB RAM , 20 GB disk. 1 TB BW, 1vCore server on their AMS2 DC, paying $5/mo for it. So most of my review is based on this server, with the uptime.
Service/Support
I have now used their support some times, and I have to say that DO have a great support team. Their response time on “normal” support tickets is around 14 minutes average from my tickets.
I have not had any big technical issue, so I can't say anything about how helpfull they are about issues like that.
Their service is great, they are very active on Twitter, and they really take customers serious.
I have now started using their servers in productions. I have one VPS backup server and one VPN server with them.
Benchmark
I still get pretty good network speeds on my NL node. Around 50 MB/s from other NL nodes. The disk IO is around 200 MB/s this time.
Network/uptime
My monitoring services tells me that I have a 100% uptime the last 90 days with 1 minute monitors. I’m using their AMS2 and NY2 location for my servers.
Conclusion
DigitalOcean is not a complete cloud host, it lack some cloud features like HA, fail-over, firewall etc, but it still is a really good host. Servers is deployed within one minute, you can choose from several locations, templates etc. You can create templates and backups that you can transfer from EU to US and vica versa.
Their servers is really good, you can resize your servers with one click, and their uptime is really good. (the best).
Signup and do a test for your self, I’m sure you will like DO as much as I do.
If you want to help me out, use my aff link (it do not cost you anything, but DO will pay a small fee if you use more then $10)