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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The other rungs of our ladder, one click away:
Cloud hosting provisions computing resources — virtual machines, storage, databases — on demand through an API from a provider's pooled infrastructure, billed by usage rather than by rented box.
IaaS is the rawest cloud offering: virtual machines, storage volumes and networks rented as building blocks through an API, with everything above the infrastructure — operating system, runtime, application — assembled and operated by you.
A VPS is a software-defined slice of a physical server that behaves like a machine of its own — reserved CPU, memory and disk plus full administrative access — so you get root without paying for the whole box.
