DigitalOcean is a well-known cloud host provider aimed at developers and more advanced users, offering reliable and affordable cloud infrastructure. It’s known for coining the term Droplets to refer to their Virtual Private Servers.
However, DigitalOcean is not really that friendly towards novices and people new to the cloud hosting market. The way it’s marketed gives the impression that it’s largely aimed toward devops professionals and systems engineers. What’s more, DigitalOcean has fewer data centers around the world compared to other similar platforms (Vultr is by far superior here with 27 data centers worldwide). Also, it and can be slightly more expensive than its competitors with a smaller variety of hosting options and choices.
Having all this in mind, it’s not a bad idea to talk a little bit about DigitalOcean alternatives, the best ones which are Vultr, UpCloud, and Linode.
So stick around!
Vultr
Vultr is a high-performance cloud hosting provider with a robust infrastructure. Aimed toward businesses and developers alike, it’s a great platform for companies and individuals looking for a simplified but highly functional and flexible infrastructure.
Vultr offers VPS servers, cloud GPU, storage, single-tenant bare metal, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, and plenty more.
Data Centers
Vultr has a lot of data centers around the world. With its 27 data centers at the time of writing, it offers the largest worldwide data center network by far compared to the other three companies mentioned here.
You can find Vultr’s data centers in:
- Europe
- Germany (Frankfurt)
- France (Paris)
- Poland (Warsaw)
- Spain (Madrid)
- Sweden (Stockholm)
- The Netherlands (Amsterdam)
- UK (London)
- North America
- US (New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, Miami, Honolulu)
- Canada (Toronto)
- Mexico (Mexico City)
- South America
- Brazil (São Paulo)
- Australia
- Sydney
- Melbourne
- Asia
- Japan (Tokyo)
- Republic of Korea (Seoul)
- Singapore (Singapore)
- India (Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore)
Pricing
Vultr’s pricing is similar to UpCloud and Linode, which means it’s pretty affordable.
Vultr also has plenty of offers for optimized cloud computing, bare metal servers, managed Kubernetes engines, managed databases, cloud CPU, direct connect plans, as well as block storage and object storage.
Functionality and Technical Support
Vultr offers a wide support network consisting of a FAQ aimed to help customers with billing questions, and then there’s also a section where you can open a support ticket with fast response times and engineers available 24×7. The knowledge database, called Vultr Docs, can give you some quick answers you might need for all kinds of questions.
UpCloud
UpCloud is another cloud hosting company that offers a great Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. They offer a selection of VPS servers, object storage and block storage, managed databases, etc.
Data Centers
UpCloud has 12 worldwide data centers:
- Europe
- Germany (Frankfurt)
- Finland x2 (both in Helsinki)
- UK (London)
- Poland (Warsaw)
- Netherlands (Amsterdam)
- Spain (Madrid)
- Asia
- Singapore (Singapore)
- Australia (Sydney)
- North America
- US (Chicago, New York, and San Jose)
Functionality and Technical Support
Tech support and functionality are less comprehensive than Vultr (and more similar to Linode) but still good enough.
UpCloud has a 24/7 available live chat option for their users that can be accessed through the Control Panel. An alternative option is to send an email to their support team.
The good thing about UpCloud is that it has four brick-and-mortar offices around the world – in London, Helsinki, Seattle, and Singapore. This gives you the opportunity to speak live with UpCloud’s team if you find yourself in these cities or anywhere near them.
Linode
Linode cloud hosting company based in the US that was voted “Easiest to use” in 2022, so, as you might’ve guessed by now, it’s particularly good for developers. With a 99.99% SLA uptime, Linode offers a great mixture of the latest hardware and server developments, high performance, and good prices. Infrastructure migration, application development, site growth, and scalability – Linode can do all of that.
Data Centers
Linode currently has 11 data centers:
- Europe
- Germany (Frankfurt)
- UK (London)
- Australia
- Sydney
- Asia
- India (Mumbai)
- Singapore (Singapore)
- Japan (Tokyo)
- North America
- US (Newark, Atlanta, Fremont, Dallas)
- Canada (Toronto)
Pricing
Linode offers affordable hosting options, making it really easy to upgrade or downgrade plans.
You can choose between dedicated or shared servers or opt for high memory plans good for more demanding applications, bare metal plans offering both virtual machines and non-virtualized hardware.
Functionality and Technical Support
Linode offers a range of different support options. If you’re looking for quick, easy answers, you can go through the Community Q&A knowledge base. There’s also 24/7 available tech support that you can get either by submitting a support ticket or through phone or email, as well as the Linode IRC channel.
Conclusion
As you can see, all three alternatives have similar offers, but of course, the difference is in the nuances.
If you’re a developer, then DigitalOcean and Linode are good options to consider. If you want a variety of options and a large choice of data centers, then go with Vultr. If you want flexibility and easy scalability, go with Linode. And if you want flawless uptime, overall great infrastructure, and reliability, then UpCloud is the way to go.
As with the prices, it’s more or less the same. DigitalOcean is slightly more expensive than the other three platforms, whereas Vultr offers a really comprehensible offer of services, at times giving you more power for the same price compared to other providers.
An important thing I can’t not mention is the support all of these companies offer. When you buy the service directly with either company, sure, you’re going to receive tech support and some basic functionality. But a lot of the things you’ll still need to do on your own. Whereas, when you buy through WP Bolt, we’ll make sure you get a fully managed and supported service from whichever of these four providers you choose for your projects.
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