HN Explorer

Best Alternative to DigitalOcean?

29 points by ghettosoak ↗ HN
I have been with DigitalOcean for about 5 years now. I have decided that I would like a new VPS provider. 5 years ago, Linode was the closest competitor, closing the gap with its' customer service, but losing out to the attractive price of its competitor.

However, I know that Google and Amazon offer competing services – which carry their own implicit standards – but I guess I’d like to give my money to a ‘smaller’ competitor where possible?

Ultimately: I need a VPS that I can run a current version of Ubuntu on. Whereupon I can run PHP, MySQL, Node.js and its respective trimmings. Something I can play around with, but something that I can ship code and run my various products on.

Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.

I'm willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.

As an American, I like the idea of my server running somewhere near home. As an expat living in Switzerland, I do have a certain partiality to Swiss products.

Any experience / suggestion is welcome. Help!

43 comments

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znpy
Hetzner? Online.net/Scaleway?
justinclift
As a data point, Scaleway's responsiveness to things doesn't seem all that great.

Saying that as a new-ish (only a few months) user to them.

For example, their CentOS 7 ARM7 images come with a bug that stops yum from updating correctly.

This is a simple PR to fix the problem, yet hasn't even been looked at in the month since it was created:

https://github.com/scaleway/image-centos/pull/26

That aside though, the hardware/software/capabilities seem pretty decent. And (for me) the fix is automatically applied when servers are spun up so their sluggish response doesn't negatively affect me.

jjeaff
I've used scaleway for a while for small projects. And lately, every single instance size shows out of stock. I shut down and instance and couldn't start it back up due to their being no available instances. Not exactly confidence inspiring.
justinclift
They seem to be out of instances/space in their Amsterdam data centre whenever I've looked over the last few weeks.

Their Paris data centre though generally seems to have a few instances spare of things. Not sure if you checked both locations? :)

trillic
I love Scaleway's offerings but their lack of diversity in DC locations leaves a lot to be desired.
sabarasaba
A bit offtopic, but whats the reason you would like to move away from them? I just created a dropplet for a nextcloud server and the experience was painless
tedmiston
Your requirements are pretty generic, and are met by every cloud provider. You have some choices to make in terms of whether you want more of a PaaS (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, Heroku) vs CaaS/IaaS approach (EC2).

That said, DO is something I still use and like today. What's your main motivation for switching?

codegeek
You can look at https://vultr.com

I use both vultr and DO and they are very comparable. Vultr customer service has been decent and their pricing is competitive.

whb07
I like them as well. Some locations offer even a $5 instance/month. Very responsive and intuitive UI as well.
BartBoch
I think 2 locations (NJ and Florida?) have $2,5 servers also. Support is worse to what it was (I think it is outsourced, at least some of it), but still ok-ish.
marcusfrex
Transip.eu is solid. I have been working with them since 2014. And i have (and still) used Linode and DO too.
bobxyz
Yes, transip.eu is good services !
billconan
I will try upcloud next. Heard it’s the fastest.
kull
What is the main reason of moving away from DO? We are using them for the last few years and it’s a great ride.
akulbe
I was wondering the same thing myself. Digital Ocean had been great for me.
RantyDave
Well, sounds like support is a big issue. I'm a bit ... well, what do you expect for $5/month?
kull
So disagree. Their support is 24/7, we had an issue (later turned being our mistake), their tech support was working with us overnight. Yes, it was via email, but who cares? I would not sit with them on the phone 8 hours as we were troubleshooting. Our DO bill is $1k/mo, not sure if this impacts their response time. But on the other hand, I myself run a larger SAAS, and you are just not able to help everybody fast enough, you need to prioritize and you prioritize enterprise clients.
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jgowdy
I’ve had a good experience with SSD Nodes
mechris
I just moved from DO to OVH. More for less, and an Arch image...
vkraskov
Given no reason and the language looks more like some kind of a market survey..
cdvonstinkpot
$5/month is rather minimal, IMO. I was happy with Prgmr @ their $20/month service level.

Customer service is supposedly minimal with them, in accordance with their motto: "We don't assume you are stupid", but were helpful the few times I needed it. A bit slow maybe, but problem solved well within a week. (Turns out Rsync.net's ssh console has limited bash commands available, so Prgmr's wiki instructions to dd my disk there didn't work)

https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/...

croo
https://www.ramnode.com/

I had a small vpn for 2 years with zero downtime. Cheap too. Servers are in the Netherlands and several places in the USA.

givehimagun
Man - I don't know if they are a small company or a large corporation...but I've been with them for 5 years and I can't remember a single time it was slow/had problems/flickered a monitor/anything.

It was rock solid when I was learning Chef and provisioning 5-7 small servers on/off to learn how devops and microservices would work. I remember $1/month instances ($3/quarter).

shanecleveland
I'm pretty happy with webfaction.com. Been using them for many years. Easy and continually upgrade plans and offerings.
vram22
By upgrade, do you mean they offer more features or resources later, for the same price for which you were getting less of the same, earlier?
shanecleveland
Right. Will occasionally see increases in space, memory, bandwidth, etc., within existing plans. They have also expanded offerings available.
sigjuice
My reason to give up Digital Ocean would be to get proper IPv6 support. Right now, DO assigns you a /124 address.
brewpackage
I think you should use Vultr, There's good interface as same as DigitalOcean, and pricing is more flexible. And about speed, Vultr has good internet speed.
veddox
Strato? It's not exactly what you would call a "small" competitor, but its servers are in Germany and it's subject to German security and privacy regulations (which I consider a big bonus).
slipwalker
Server4You ( despite negative reviews i have seen ) has served me well ( very fair price for an unmetered 100Mbps link ) for over 5 years now. On the really cheap VPS options, just make sure to have your services running under a supervisor-daemon ( i use monit ) to preserve your sleep.
retrack
(Disclaimer: founder of Exoscale)

To address your partiality to Swiss products, check out Exoscale for a similar (5$) simple experience with advanced features in Datacenters in Geneva, Zurich, Vienna and Frankfurt. https://www.exoscale.com