# DigitalOcean 133 Hacker News commenters recommended DigitalOcean and 117 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (15 owners). **Verdict:** A simple, affordable cloud for small VMs and apps, with a cleaner UI than AWS and excellent guides, though critics cite weak support and a fading price advantage. ## Why people recommend it - Much simpler than AWS/Azure (9 comments): "Paying $5 a month for Digital Ocean or Hetzner will save you from the pain of using any of these cloud platform for just a simple VM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413474)) "I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947370)) "The UI is leagues better than AWS and there are really useful API endpoints to control common things." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577523)) - Cheap for small workloads (8 comments): "Paying $5 a month for Digital Ocean or Hetzner will save you from the pain of using any of these cloud platform for just a simple VM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413474)) "most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816786)) "paying digital ocean about 30 dollars a month for 4 commercial websites with fully featured Postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375615)) - Excellent docs and tutorials (3 comments): "DigitalOcean is such a dream to use. I also really appreciate all their guides for almost everything web server related." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46225397)) "I think DigitalOcean was successful because we did a combination of: Actually useful content marketing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671462)) "I've had nothing but good experiences with them and their docs and tutorials are excellent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212491)) - Clean UI and useful API (4 comments): "The UI is leagues better than AWS and there are really useful API endpoints to control common things." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577523)) "its really nice to set up some hdd & cpu alerts from within cloud provider control panel directly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296611)) "I love Digital Ocean. The UI and the service itself is great. API is nice too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577708)) ## What people warn about - Unresponsive or harsh customer support (4 comments): "they need to focus strongly on following up on people's complaints about their existing services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577822)) "DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816493)) "capricious, inhumane, and uncaring about customer support, service terminations, and customer wind-down processes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294328)) - No longer cheap versus Hetzner (4 comments): "Still an awesome service and platform.. but no longer worth it price wise as it once was." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578313)) "it's like the last decade of technological progress with regards to RAM, CPU and storage that should either lead to price cuts/spec bumps didn't happen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816750)) "They occupy some weird middle ground where they've become too expensive for hobbyists but not good enough for enterprise use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580919)) - Hardware failures and outages (3 comments): "Yeah overall they are ok. I think 3 times managed db and one or twice a vps just dead." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212077)) "AWS has way better peering agreements than DO. Lots of problems with terrible throughput and lots of dropped packets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739717)) "most outages I had on linux was with my VPS was due to Digital Ocean issue with their own hardware failures" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834283)) - Questionable open source sponsorship choices (2 comments): "Digital Ocean even withdrew funding from projects that didn't take DHH money, effectively punishing them for their stance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690537)) "Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774290)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Hetzner](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner.md): 415 recommend - [exe.dev](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exe-dev.md): 115 recommend - [Hetzner Cloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner-cloud.md): 99 recommend - [OVH hosting](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ovh.md): 81 recommend - [Amazon EC2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-ec2.md): 73 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.digitalocean.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "DigitalOcean", https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).