DigitalOcean vs. Pantheon

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

Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability.

Incentivized

• 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

• Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
• The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
• The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
• Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
• The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.

Incentivized

• 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

• Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
• Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
• Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.

Incentivized

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

Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.

Incentivized

Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.

Incentivized

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

Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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

• Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
• Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
• Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.

Incentivized