VPS

DigitalOcean’s features, plan with price & benchmark result

hajime.kurita

Contents

Official information

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Features of DigitalOcean

Short summary

VPS which has most advanced cloud functions.

Overall features

DigitalOcean is one of the big VPS which is satisfying cloud hosting’s principals.

Elasticity: You can dispose the server after creation of the server any time without losing money in vain
Redundancy: You can keep serving the service even if 1 of the server goes down(LAN&LB are necessary)
Extendable: You can scale up the server with data

DigitalOcean is providing most advanced cloud functions such as App Platform, Managed database, Managed Kubernetes(k8s) and so on.

Load balancer is supporting free SSL certification of “Let’s encrypt” with auto updating and wild card SSL certificate, which is great.

Maximum memory and CPU is higher compared to others.
In the case of standard plan, even if you increase number of CPU core, total cpu score doesn’t increase so much compared to the increase of CPU’s cores but higher CPU plan will get relatively better score.

In 2020, Digital Ocean got $100 million through finance and announced 3 years road map which is showing that they will provide “App Platform” which support us from development to deployment & operation with functions like serverless services.
And they are achieving what they promised.

Features of App Platform

App Platform will automatically analyze your code on GitHub, create build artifacts (in the form of containers), and publish your application to the cloud.
It also has lifecycle management features, vertical and horizontal scaling, push-to-deploy support, introspection and monitoring features, built-in database management and integration – everything a developer needs to get their code live in production.

So it will help you to concentrate on your code, not on infra.
Managed Kubernetes(k8s) is also infrastructure which helps you to automate management of infra and you can set more detail by yourself.
But k8s is not easy.
If you don’t have the resource and time to study k8s, App platform is for you.

You can associate code deployment to the servers with github repository easily following way.

Here are some of the features.

Deployment to the server is triggered by put to github’s repository, which means that deployment process is automated.
You can scale up your service easy from admin screen or CLI without stoppinc your service by increasing number of servers or making server’s spec better.
Static sites are free for 3 web sites.
DB should be brought from Managed Database service of DigitalOcean

There are 3 plans.
Starter(Free), Basic and Professional
You can construct only static web sites in Starter plan.
In Basic plan, you can use it for dynamic web sites like PHP web sites.
In Professional plan, you can use dedicated CPU.
Here is detail of the difference among plans.

Currently you can use App platform only in limited DCs (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, New York).

Features of Managed DB of DigitalOcean

– Setting and management is not necessary
– Free daily backup and recovery function is available
– Auto recovery in the case of failure
– Scale up is possible
– PostgresSQL, MySQL and Redis are available

Features of Managed Kubernets(k8s)

You will not be charged for usage of k8s itself but you will be charged for underlying server instances.
And 3 servers are required at least in the case of k8s service, so if $10 is minimum price for 1 server, $30 is minimum price for using k8s.

Features of VPC(Virtual Private Cloud)

You can use network in which only your owned servers can communicate with each other.

Support of Containers service

DigitalOcean is spending its resource to enhance services of supporting usage of containers.
App platform, Managed Kubernetes(k8s), Container registry and so on are for containers.

Support of container service

In addition of creating instance of container, DigitalOcean is offering Managed Kubernetes(k8s) and container registry service.

Price and plan of DigitalOcean

Servers

Basic Plan: Regular

Basic Plan: Intel

Basic Plan: AMD

General Purpose (Dedicated CPU)

CPU Optimized (Dedicated CPU)

Memory Optimized (Dedicated CPU)

Storage Optimized (Dedicated CPU)

NVMe type SSD

App Platform

In the case of Starter in which we can use it only fore static web sites, up to 3 web sites are free. If you create more, $3/mon will be charged for 1 web site.
In the case of Basic & Professional plan, following cost will be charged per server.

Managed database

Floating IP address

If you don’t associate your instance with floating IP address, $4/mon will be charged.
But if you associate your instance with floating IP address, floating IP address will be free.

Load balancer

You should choose based on your expected maximum traffic.

Type	Cost/month	Maximum HTTPS request per second
Small	$10	8300
Medium	$30	23900
Large	$60	41900

DigitalOcean’s cloud function list

DDoS protection and High Availability are not provided for server’s plan but you can get them if you use App Platform.

Network response time of DigitalOcean’s data center

This is example from Tokyo.
You should choose data center which is closest to your expected users.

DC	Ping response time from Tokyo
Amsterdam	0.264 seconds
Bangalore	0.115 seconds
Frankfurt	0.255 seconds
London	0.211 seconds
New York	0.160 seconds
San Francisco	0.110 seconds
Singapore	0.071 seconds
Toronto	0.209 seconds

Is your provided CPU good one or bad one?

There is performance difference among CPU.
You can check whether it is good one or bad one by checking CPU information.
If you get bad one, it may be better for you to destroy it and create new instance again.

When new CPU becomes available, you should consider to renew instance by taking snapshot of current instance and recreate new instance until you get best CPU.

CPU information for DigitalOcean is available at
CPU list of VPS