What is DigitalOcean?
DigitalOcean is a private company that offers hosting services. It was founded in 2011, with their headquarters in New York with data centers worldwide. As of December 2020, DigitalOcean was the third-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers. In July 2020 they had over 530 employees.
What about the pricing?
DigitalOcean approaches the issue of pricing in a unique way.
Instead of offering pre-made plans with features that scale up with the price, they offer so-called Droplets, where you choose exactly what you need. They’re charged by the hour, starting at $0.007/hr which comes up to $5 per month, but go up into the thousands depending on specific needs.
They accepts credit/debit cards and PayPal, but they do not offer refunds.
What do they offer?
They offer a 60-day $100 credit to new users so anyone can test their service. That’s what I did! For this trial you need a PayPal account or a credit card. For PayPal you must deposit at least $5. This isn’t the case with cards, but they warn that they may have to place a pre-authorization charge that will be cancelled once your card is confirmed.
After this verification, you will receive the credit and the 60 days of testing and you will be sent to the page to create a Droplet.
I chose a Droplet with a dedicated processor: 2 vCPUs, 25GB SSD and 4GB memory. After that, I put a name, a password and it took about a minute until I had access to SSH. Keep in mind that this Droplet costs $40 / month, which is $0.06 / hour.
The operating system I chose (Ubuntu 20.04) came with some useful packages.
This is what the htop looks like after the first start. I did the following tests:
- SpeedTest
- Sysbench on CPU, RAM and DISK.
The speedtest impressed me, with very good results.
The speedtest was done in Frankfurt because it is also the region I chose when creating the Droplet.
And now, look at these tests done by Sysbench.
CPU 
RAM 
DISK
Not bad for $0.06 / hour, you can see it’s a dedicated processor for the power it offers.
Conclusion. Is this service worth it?
Yes, it’s worth it. It is one of the few hosting companies that offers a trial to test what it can do. Thus, I recommend you to test this service and make a personal opinion.
