DigitalOcean. As far as my experience is concerned, so far so good. A good number of things have changed when I hit a year staying with DigitalOcean. Thankfully, we never had any big issues whatsoever because the Droplets at DigitalOcean has been very reliable. Now, all my sites including my wife’s are on DigitalOcean, the online invoicing system my company uses is on DigitalOcean. That’s how much trust we put on DigitalOcean as a hosting provider. Bottom line, they earned it. So what has changed after two years.
More Regions
When I started out, only New York and Amsterdam were the available regions. Now, there’s San Francisco, then Singapore for sites that primarily serve users near Asia and London for the UK sites.More Applications
This wasn’t available yet when I started with DigitalOcean, now it’s easier than ever to roll out web applications which include: Ruby on Rails, WordPress, LEMP, LAMP, Django, MEAN, nodeJS, Ghost, GitLab, Docker, Drupal, Dokku, Magento and Redmine. Then there’s plenty of documentation to go around from the community and from the DigitalOcean support.IPV6
Finally, support for IP v6, though never had the need for it, a lot of users asked for it during the early days of DigitalOcean. They took a while but they eventually did, just shows that DigitalOcean listen to their customers.DNS
Yes, I know, this should be standard but almost a year ago, this wasn’t even available so that means they’re improving their feature set still. I do tend to combo with CloudFlare but that’s better left for another post. For the curious, here’s a detailed tour of the technology features that DigitalOcean has to offer. Oh here’s a trivia, do you know that sites like GetFlyWheel and CloudWays uses the hosting infrastructure of DigitalOcean?KISS
Keep it simple stupid. Not really a change but at this point, I think I understand why DigitalOcean has been growing in leaps and bounds. They’ve kept things as simple and tidy as possible without sacrificing usability. I can still remember when we tried deploying an app on Amazon’s service, the documentation we had to go through was just a plain nightmare.
The best thing I like about DigitalOcean’s charm is the ease in deploying systems. Of course, this is my personal opinion but I’m basing this on my experience where launching a VPS instance was as easy as a few clicks and didn’t require any manual provisioning (and waiting) from the hosting company.
I’m crossing my fingers, but for the last 24 months I’ve been with DigitalOcean, things have rather been very predictable and uneventful. Sounds boring but I’d like to keep it that way, cost is very reasonable and the service is rock steady. So far, I’m a happy camper ^_^
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