DigitalOcean: our take
The cloud as developers want it: honest primitives, flat pricing, superb documentation — and nobody standing between you and your own 3 a.m. mistakes.
Developers and the developer-curious: custom stacks, side projects, and learning how servers actually work.
Affiliate disclosure: links to DigitalOcean on this page are affiliate links — signing up through them may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we say here; the caveats stay in.
What you're actually buying
DigitalOcean is IaaS with the hyperscaler complexity deliberately left out: droplets (cloud VPS instances), managed databases, object storage, load balancers, a Kubernetes offering and an app platform — a catalog you can hold in your head, priced flat enough to predict a monthly bill. For websites, apps and side projects, that smaller catalog isn't a limitation; it's the feature. The other signature asset is the tutorial library: DigitalOcean's guides taught a sizable share of the industry its Linux, and they're just as useful when you host elsewhere.
Where it genuinely fits
- Developers with custom stacks — anything beyond 'PHP app on a panel': Node, Python, Go, containers, background workers, your rules.
- Learning servers properly — a small droplet is the classic classroom: cheap, disposable, entirely yours. Pair it with their tutorials and the Hosting & Cloud concepts.
- Side projects growing into products — start on the smallest droplet, scale to managed databases and load balancers on the same platform, spiky traffic included.
The admin job is real
Unmanaged means what it says: patches, firewalls, backups, monitoring and outage diagnosis are yours (our VPS explainer lists the day-to-day honestly). The managed products soften specific corners — databases especially — and the App Platform is a genuine PaaS escape hatch when you'd rather push code than run servers. But if the whole admin role is what you want gone, a managed layer like Cloudways — which can run on these very machines — is the honest answer.
About our link
DigitalOcean runs a referral program rather than a classic affiliate network: new accounts through our link start with signup credit to experiment against, and if you go on to become a paying customer, our account receives platform credit. Costs you nothing, disclosed here because that's how we'd want it done for us.
DigitalOcean — quick answers
Is DigitalOcean cheaper than AWS?
For the workloads it targets, it's above all more predictable: flat instance prices and bandwidth allowances instead of a bill assembled from dozens of metered line items. Hyperscalers win on service breadth and enterprise depth, not on being simple to budget. For a website or app, predictability is usually the feature that matters.
Can a non-developer use DigitalOcean?
The honest answer: only on its managed edges (App Platform, managed databases) — a raw droplet assumes terminal comfort. If you're developer-curious, it's the best place we know to become one; if you're not, pick a managed rung and keep your evenings.
What's a droplet, exactly?
DigitalOcean's name for a cloud VPS: a virtual machine you create in about a minute, sized and priced flatly, with root access and your choice of Linux. Everything our VPS glossary entry describes — reserved resources, full control, full responsibility — applies verbatim.
Not convinced?
The other rungs of our ladder, one click away:
- Bluehost — Your first WordPress site or a small business site that needs to exist, not scale.
- Cloudways — Sites that have outgrown shared hosting but don't want to adopt server administration as a hobby.
- Liquid Web — Business-critical sites and WooCommerce stores where downtime costs real money and support must answer.
- Shopify — Selling online without assembling hosting, software, payments and security yourself.
The concepts behind this pick
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the model in which servers, storage and databases are created on demand through an API from a provider's pooled hardware and billed for the time they exist, rather than rented as a fixed box by the month.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
IaaS is the layer of cloud computing where you rent raw infrastructure through an API, meaning virtual machines, disks and networks, and take responsibility for the operating system and everything you install above it.
VPS (Virtual Private Server)
A VPS is a software-defined slice of one physical machine that behaves as a server in its own right, with its own operating system, reserved CPU, memory and disk, and administrative access down to the kernel.