A2 Hosting vs. DigitalOcean

if you're looking for a somewhat cheap web host but don't care about uptime, outages or decent technical support then A2 is ideal

DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.

Incentivized

• the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price

• Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
• Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
• Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.

Incentivized

• technical support
• quality control
• escalating issues to management when needed
• customer service communication
• training their tech support team

• Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
• While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
• There are no regions available on South America.
• They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.

Incentivized

Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.

I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!

Incentivized

[In my opinion] it barely works.

With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.

Incentivized

they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption

Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.

Incentivized

They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!

Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.

Incentivized

[In my opinion] they have the worst customer support. It's awful. [I feel like] they talk over you [and] they blame anything but what is real. [It makes me think] they are uneducated. [When I dealt with them] they never answered why things went wrong. [I feel like] they are nightmares and just hard to deal with. And, [from my experience] they are NOT nice. [I felt like] they act condescending in conversations. They waste so much time over nothing.

They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.

Incentivized

[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.

I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.

Incentivized

I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less

Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.

Incentivized

• they are adequate for a startup looking for cheap site hosting but unreliable for anything beyond

• DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
• DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
• We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.

Incentivized