digitalocean-as-a-vps-provider.md

title: DigitalOcean as a VPS provider post_date: 2013-08-12 10:25:00 post_name: digitalocean-as-a-vps-provider

Why I use DigitalOcean as a virtual private server provider

1. Price
   I could have started with performance or interface, but it's the price that initially drew me to DigitalOcean. For $5 / month (billed at $0.007 / hour) you get a fast, if somewhat resource limited virtual server as well as 1 terabyte of outgoing data transfer.

2. Interface
   While Amazon certainly has a diverse and mature array of PaaS products, DigitalOcean absolutely kills Amazon EC2 when it comes to provisioning a server. The provisioning process takes less than one minute in most cases. You simply assign a hostname, choose a server size, and select a Linux distribution. System backups are optional and completely automatic, and cost 20% above the hourly cost of the server alone. All information is clearly presented and updates are responsive.

3. Performance
   Even the smallest DigitalOcean servers are well balanced, and are certainly priced well below what other vendors would charge. Factor in the disk IO of hundreds of MB per second and you might get away with zRam and a small swap image.

I'm hosting both this site, as well as a research project on DigitalOcean and cannot recommend it enough. Try it out!