Published on November 2, 2022 by Kevin Graham
Vultr and DigitalOcean are cloud platforms that offer various cloud services, among which the most popular are their virtual private servers or VPSs. These cost-effective and very efficient hosting solutions take less space and are easily scalable without compromising on CPU power, memory, and storage.
In this article, I’ll be comparing Vultr and DigitalOcean to see what kind of features they offer, their usability, the quality of their tech support, and more. So stick around, and let’s start!
Vultr was founded in 2014, and it quickly rose to be one of the best on the market. Vultr offers all the essentials of cloud computing, such as shared and dedicated cloud servers, cloud GPU, Kubernetes, bare metal plans, managed databases, load balancers, and of course, block and object storage.
It also has really versatile pricing options for all kinds of budgets and performance needs. With their 27 worldwide data centers, they’ve made their cloud services available and fully functional around the globe.
Unlike DigitalOcean, which is more developer-oriented, the services of Vultr can be used by both developers and small, medium-sized, as well as large businesses that look for flexible and high-performing infrastructure and a customizable control panel.
DigitalOcean was founded a couple of years earlier than Vultr, in 2011. But their real breakthrough came in 2013 when they became one of a handful of companies that offered SSD-based virtual machine services, which really positively impacted their popularity and visibility on the market.
Since then, they’ve also expanded their data centers around the world and decided to focus first and foremost on developers, which is their primary client target even as I’m writing this article right now.
DigitalOcean covers a large array of cloud services such as their Droplets, scalable VPSs, managed Kubernetes clusters, managed databases, block and object storage, virtual private cloud, load balancers, and much more.
As I mentioned above, Vultr has 27 data centers around the world, which is a huge number and is, in fact, a leader in its category. Nine are in the US (Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Miami, Honolulu, Atlanta, and Silicon Valley), one is in Mexico (Mexico City), one in Canada (Toronto), seven are in Europe (Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Paris, Warsaw), six are in Asia (Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore), two in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne), and one in Brazil (São Paulo).
At the moment, DigitalOcean has 13 data centers worldwide, far less than Vultr, although they still do a pretty good job at providing servers where most customers will need them. Two are in Asia (Bangalore and Singapore), four are in Europe (two in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London), one in Canada (Toronto), and six are in the US (three in San Fransisco and three in New York).
As I already mentioned, DigitalOcean is aimed at developers, giving them all the tools to make efficient and fast apps. Their Droplets offer scalable and flexible solutions for VPSs. You can customize the CPU, RAM, and storage of the Droplets – it all depends on the number of resources you need for your enterprise. Automatic scalability is also available for the managed Kubernetes clusters.
From the pre-installed apps, you can choose between MongoDB, WordPress, Lamp, NodeJS, Docker, and MySQL. There is, of course, the option to add your own.
Vultr also offers plenty of instantly available one-click installers for popular apps and management tools of the likes of WordPress, Joomla!, cPanel, Drupal, Magenta, PrestaShop, and MediaWiki. They also give you the option to install other apps and to use scripts.
But if the basics are what you need, Vultr has got you covered without a doubt.
Scalability is easy with both Vultr and DigitalOcean since they offer a variety of options to upgrade or downgrade your current plan, depending on your budget and app requirements. Both companies offer very solid infrastructure for developing simpler projects, as well as more complex ones that require much more memory and power.
Vultr and DigitalOcean do offer very similar services to their clients. However, while the client target is larger with Vultr, DigitalOcean has chosen to focus on developers.
Vultr is truly a versatile cloud platform because it offers a large choice of shared and dedicated cloud servers and is appropriate for everyone’s budget. Once you get into the Droplets world of DigitalOcean, you’ll see that they also have plenty of different options for different projects, although their pricing is a tad more expensive than Vultr’s.
If you’re still in doubt – no worries. You can easily try both because the basic options they offer don’t cost a lot, and they will give you a nice preview of what you can expect from these platforms, including their user interface.
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