DigitalOcean Droplets

Score8.7 out of 10

28 Reviews and Ratings

What is DigitalOcean Droplets?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DigitalOcean's Droplets to power our web servers for client sites, SaaS platforms, custom app backends, and more. They have been a great option that mixes an easy-to-use deployment options with optimal performance. The dashboard provides access to critical statistics on our servers, allowing us to address any performance issues with one-click upgrades.

Pros

Easy to launch
Performant
Secure

Cons

Some platforms offer better performance for cheaper servers

Return on Investment

Only positive - without their great offering at a great price, we wouldn't be able to server our clients and quickly release new products

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Vultr

Other Software Used

Vultr, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Cloudflare

Prashant Chaudhari View profile

Head of Engineering & Founding team member in Engineering at Jombay (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DO droplets to host our applications. We are SaaS platform which includes more than 30 web applications.
We use Digital Ocean to host some of our services along with manager Load Balancer. We also deploy cloud firewalls to protect these droplets from cyber attacks.

Pros

Quick to setup
Faster launch times
SSD storage by default
Multiple ready to use images for quickly setting up the stack you need

Cons

Honestly speaking, we never faced any challenge while using the droplets
It is developer friendly platform, but may be a bit difficult for non devs to run things
Nothing else as such

Most Important Features

Cost benefit
SSDs for amazing performance
Ease of setup

Return on Investment

It helped us run our platform with minimum cost for a long time
It was easy for our team to quickly understand and get started
The only negative is that you can't shut down the droplets to save cost, you have to destroy the droplets.

Alternatives Considered

Rackspace Managed Hosting, Linode and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Postman, GitHub

Laila Abouizza

Backend Developer in Information Technology at FastEcomAds (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

pay per hour model
droplets availability on different regions
the ability to instantly destroy a droplet

Cons

it would be great if they can add more server locations preferably in the MENA region

Most Important Features

snapshots to take a backup of our servers
the option to scale up and down server resources on demand
the ability to create test droplets and only get charged few cents for the few hours they've been up

Return on Investment

DigitalOcean Droplets has no downtime which allows us to always have our website up and take orders from our customers which is a must for our industry
The DigitalOcean Droplets scaling option saved us multiple times from missing out on acquiring new customers when we had unusual spikes of website traffic
DigitalOcean Droplets is a reliable and cost-efficient solution that allows us to save a lot of money on buying our own servers and maintaining them

Alternatives Considered

SiteGround

Other Software Used

Shopify Plus, Dropbox Business, monday.com, Typeform

Tom Blazek View profile

IT Manager in Information Technology at Rancilio Group North America (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Digital Ocean Droplets made it very simple to move some web apps to the cloud. It has also allowed us to utilize contractors, without giving them access to our internal network. I love not having to worry about the security of our web apps, and plan to migrate more things up to the digital ocean in the future

Pros

Easy to add new VM's
Easy to share access with others
Cost is very competitive

Cons

The interface has a lot going on, so hard to know where to go
VM configuration could be easier

Most Important Features

Easy to setup
Easy to share access with others
Cost

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

Other Software Used

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Scale Computing HC3

Anuj Rai View profile

Senior Associate Technology in Information Technology at Synechron (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

Easy USER interface
Cost effective compared to other cloud giants
Quick deployment of Droplets

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.

Most Important Features

Affordable and cheap pricing
Quick deployment and server quality is good
Documentation and tutorials videos easily available and we'll documented.

Return on Investment

In terms of pricing, it has proved beneficial as we have checked with other cloud providers and their pricing is quite high in comparison to droplets.
Easy deployment of droplets makes the application available faster for testing purposes.
Reliability is really good and taking backup is quite easy.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Compute Optimizer

Other Software Used

Datadog, AppDynamics, Pandora FMS