DigitalOcean vs. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price 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
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price 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
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsIBM 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
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Features
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.20 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images7.50 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Operating system support8.40 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Security controls9.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Automation5.00 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 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
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User Ratings
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanIBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
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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
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.
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No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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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
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.
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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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Scalability
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • 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.
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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