I am with DigitalOcean  for more than 5 years where I have more VPS servers bought for my sites and my customer sites from here in Romania. This 5 years experience was very pleasant with DigitalOcean as no incident has happened and the servers are working perfectly. Since the beginning, I have changed multiple hosting companies starting with shared hosting and ending up to VPS’s. This is the first service that satisfies completely my needs so far. In this article, I would like to present what DigitalOcean has to offer and how exactly it can help you host your WordPress sites with good performance.

If you are interested to see how Hetzner is comparing with DigitalOcean you should see: DigitalOcean VS Hetzner: Which is The Best VPS Provider

If you are interested to see how the best VPS providers compare check the DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner article.

DigitalOcean is much more now than a simple VPS provider as it has various different products that can help you with different kinds of stuff. I remember that at beginning DigitalOcean was a simple hosting company that offered VPS machines (droplets as they call them) and with time grew to offers Spaces,Volumes, Databases, Kubernetes and CDN thru spaces. Yes, now is becoming a cloud company with a lot to offer.

DigitalOcean Products&Services

Besides VM products DO has extended into below services as well:

• Storage – with volume storage in case you need additional disk space to host your applications or media. Object Storage that is coming with a CDN option. You can host your files here and that can be accessed fast from various locations. This can be also a good alternative to other CDN. You can pay 5$ a month and have 250GB and 1 TB transfer. You have a comparison here: Comparing KeyCDN and DigitalOcean’s new Spaces CDN
• Managed Database – at 15$/month you can have a PostgreSQL database administrated by DO.
• Kubernetes Clusters – on the DigitalOcean compete with 5$ droplets and Load Balancers you can have your Kubernetes Cluster created easely.
• NETWORKING – you can create Cloud Firewalls to better control access to your droplets and ports. Load balancing: you can create load balancers to your applications that support HTTP/2 and Let’s Encrypt  + Proxy Protocol support
  

As you can see DigitalOcean has grown along the years and it is offering some interesting services at very good prices.

DigitalOcean Review From Hosting Perspective

In this review of DigitalOcean I will present the VPS part and what exactly has to offer for you and your hosting needs.

Below is a picture that I have with my 3 VPS that I have on DigitalOcean:

Hosting Alternatives

I would like to discuss first what other options for hosting are out there that can host your WordPress site at a professional level so you can understand why DigitalOcean is the best for you. In terms of hosting you can go to the below directions:

• Shared Hosting – which in this case you will pay a fee of around 5$ to have your sites hosted in a shared environment with a shared IP on the lower price. A good company that is offering a good shared hosting plan is SiteGround This company is offering very good Managed WordPress hosting and it can make things very easily if you are not a technical person or you don’t like to bother with technical aspects. The difference with DigitalOcean is that with 5$ you can host multiple sites securely on a dedicated IP and have good performances.
• WordPress special hosting companies – There are 3 companies that are offering professional hosting packages at around more than 25$  a month for a lower package, these companies are WPEngine, Kinsta or WPXHosting. These are professional hosting companies with higher prices and not for everyone ( especially someone who is at the beginning)
• Other VPS – there are other good VPS companies out there like Linode and Vultr. They are offering the same services as DigitalOcean so if you don’t like DO or have something against it you can try one of the 2. I have tried both in the past just for tests and the performance is comparable with DigitalOcean ( still from my tests DO is doing better) For a more affordable option to DigitalOcean, you can check this Hetzner Review.

Price

On DigitalOcean you can start from 5$ a month for a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and 25GB of SSD disk space and 1 CPU. Depending on how much power you need you can go up and by with 10$ a VPS with 2GB of RAM and 50 GB of SSD space and so on. Below is a picture with the packages that they are offering:

From my point of view and the feedback that I can give after 1 year with them the the price – package is excellent and can’t be beaten by anyone.

Server Creation

The process of creating a VPS server at DigitalOcean is very easy and you only need to choose the package with the memory ,CPU and ram that you want and continue with the datacenter with the location, chose the OS and the applications and your VPS will be ready in no time:

Data-centers:

Data-centers are important in case your application/website is addressing that region. In case your user base is in Asia you would better take a VPS in an Asian data-center as this will make requests faster for the users within that region. DigitalOcean has the below datacenters:

• US: New Yourk, San Francisco
• Europe: Amsterdam,London and Frankfurt
• Canada
• Asia: Bangalore and Singapore

Performance and Uptime

I have a couple off Droplets where I have my sites hosted. On DigitalOcean Droplets I have installed Virtualmin or EasyEngine to host my WordPress Sites. For the EasyEngine,I am using the DigitalOcean DNS management and for the Virtualmin one using the VPS DNS management with my custom DNS servers.

I have done some performance testing at VPS level to see the IO and network speed. The server is a 5$ one and it has the below results:

bench.sh results:

[root@ns1 ~]# wget -qO- bench.sh | bash
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU model            : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz
Number of cores      : 1
CPU frequency        : 1797.917 MHz
Total size of Disk   : 25.0 GB (7.1 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem  : 991 MB (433 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 1023 MB (323 MB Used)
System uptime        : 8 days, 2 hour 25 min
Load average         : 0.41, 0.50, 0.44
OS                   : CentOS 7.6.1810
Arch                 : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel               : 3.10.0-957.10.1.el7.x86_64
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I/O speed(1st run)   : 625 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run)   : 599 MB/s
I/O speed(3rd run)   : 637 MB/s
Average I/O speed    : 620.3 MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Node Name                       IPv4 address            Download Speed
CacheFly                        205.234.175.175         138MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP               106.187.96.148          12.5MB/s
Linode, Singapore, SG           139.162.23.4            8.61MB/s
Linode, London, UK              176.58.107.39           31.5MB/s
Linode, Frankfurt, DE           139.162.130.8           24.4MB/s
Linode, Fremont, CA             50.116.14.9             27.9MB/s
Softlayer, Dallas, TX           173.192.68.18           39.6MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA          67.228.112.250          25.6MB/s
Softlayer, Frankfurt, DE        159.122.69.4            10.7MB/s

speedtest.py test results:

./speedtest.py
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Digital Ocean (159.203.100.92)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Pilot (New York, NY) [17.81 km]: 3.359 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 2428.07 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed................................................................................................
Upload: 1646.00 Mbit/s

[root@ns1 ~]# ./speedtest.py --server 4769
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Digital Ocean (159.203.100.92)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Retrieving information for the selected server...
Hosted by Broadcasting Center Europe SA (Luxembourg) [6058.65 km]: 123.953 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 404.90 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed................................................................................................
Upload: 110.87 Mbit/s

WordPress Load time on 5$ Droplet:

www.wpdoze.com

The results are quite good and the sites are loading under 1 second. I don’t know if you need more then this. But if you do check the bellow result from the Europe VPS with EasyEngine installed:

Stress test:

I have run a stress test with an online tool loadimpact to see how is doing and it did very well. With 25 users in same time it didn’t barely was any difference.

Pros

• Price – no one can beat the price of 5$
• Performance- the performance is very good and the VPS servers are very fast.
• Clean Interface – the interface is clean and it is easy to use
• Service Variety – in case you need additional services they can be accessed very easy
• Automation with Terraform – in case you need some automation to deploy automaticaly the services you have Terraform

Cons

• Hard to maintain – for non technical persons can be hard to administrate the servers.
• More data centers – I feel that they can add some new datacenters as for instance one in Australia.
• TTFB (Time to first byte) – there is room for improvement when it comes to TTFB

Other aspects

• Support – never used it so far, everything worked so good and I didn’t needed anything from them.
• Knowledgeable -they have a good repository with knowledge objects and a lot of tutorials.

The main difference between  DigitalOcean and the shared hosting account and other professional hosting companies like WPengine and others is the fact that here you have to install everything on your server and to manage it. If you know what to do the things will be great otherwise you can encounter problems. To help newbies I have created some tutorials that can help with installing everything you need to host your websites on a DigitalOcean Droplet. Below are the articles that have step by step videos:

• How to Install Virtualmin on CentOS 7 With PHP 7 and NGINX
• Install EasyEngine On Ubuntu 18.04 With PHP 7.2

DigitalOcean Video Review