DigitalOcean Droplets vs. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
$4
per month
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud bare metal servers are cloud servers configurable in hourly/monthly options, on-demand, from any location—with a selection of standard features and services for small businesses and enterprise demands. Users can customize RAM and SSDs with 11M+ configurations from which to choose.
$0.51
per hour
Pricing
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Editions & Modules
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
starting at $0.51
per hour
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
starting at $241.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.IBM Bare Metal Servers offer a choice between hourly or monthly pre-configured servers or can be customized with single to quad processing solutions. Bare metal servers are available worldwide and with no monthly contracts. Amonthly bare metal server built to spec can be ordered and made available in two to four hours—with 500 GB/month outbound bandwidth included. An hourly bare metal server can be ordered, and it is made ready for in 20 to 30 minutes. Public outbound bandwidth is charged per gigabyte.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Features
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean Droplets
-
Ratings
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Small Businesses
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.9 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOcean DropletsIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Likelihood to Recommend
There are some other platforms that compete with DigitalOcean Droplets that have more performant servers for a very minimal price decrease. However, DigitalOcean's servers still have great performance, and the experience is better when you consider the developer console, managed options, and uptime that DigitalOcean offers. DigitalOcean is the better all-around package.
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IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers are best suited if you are looking for an alternative for adding computing resources to your organization's IT domain. The costs of owning and maintaining a physical resource in the organization are far more than renting computing resources on the cloud. The bare-metal servers allow you to utilize the entire server for your organization's requirements.
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Pros
  • Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
  • Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
  • Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more
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  • Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
  • Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
  • Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.
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Cons
  • In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
  • No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
  • Number of service is quite limited.
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  • Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
  • No networking monitoring is available.
  • Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.
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Usability
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.
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Alternatives Considered
DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel.
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Configured file systems on bare metal servers and was able to increase the size whenever required. Can limit the costs initially to understand the application demand and need. Later, have the flexibility to increase the size of the file system as the application grows bigger and bigger without any hassle.
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Return on Investment
  • Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
  • Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
  • The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible
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  • [I feel] IBM caused significant damages to their acknowledged "gross negligence." [...] [In my opinion,] holding customers/data hostage to limit gross negligence is an extremely poor practice.
  • [With my experiences,] our investment was a tremendous loss in time & resources. Their lack of support, [in my opinion,] has caused us to pivot our entire business model and revenue stream. Our product re-launch has been setback by ~18 months due to damages caused by [in my experience, to be] IBM's gross negligence.
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ScreenShots

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Screenshots

Screenshot of ConfiguringScreenshot of Bandwidth ProvisioningScreenshot of Remote ManagementScreenshot of Firmware Management