My story with DigitalOcean

Let’s go to the beginning of time. Back in 2013 I was developing an Android app French Made Easy back in secondary school. The app data was written in Wordpress and then extracted using a PHP script into JSON format.

Because the data was not mine, I didn’t want to use shared hosting for security concern, I began looking at VPS server. There was not much choice, and all options were extremally expensive. All but one, DigitalOcean. For $5 you could have your own personal server. I was hooked.

I have been using DigitalOcean since that time. I had one server running, the server came with Ubuntu 13.10 but have been upgraded. The server is reliable, the network is fast. It has IPv6, SSD. Basically everything a developer might need. But that’s the catch. Developer. DO is brilliant if you want a dirty cheap test servers. Spin up, test on 20 machines, kill them, deploy to production. But I don’t think it should be the production. If you are a student like me, you know that even cheap servers are expensive.

I am writing it from perspective of late 2016. You have OVH and Scaleway, both of which offer very good servers with 2GB of RAM for only $4 (tax included). At this point DigitalOcean stopped being the leader in cheap servers, and began being the most expensive option. Their pricing never evolved. Linode even doubled the amount of RAM they provide.

Don’t get me wrong. If you look for express support, spin-up-spin-down servers then DigitalOcean is your best bet, but if you want to run something bigger, even as a student I would go for OVH or Scaleway.

Edit: DigitalOcean has doubled their RAM for most of their droplets at the beginning of 2018. Its a good step but the servers are still expensive.