DigitalOcean

What hackers pick instead

• HetznerRecommended for cheap, powerful cloud and bare-metal servers that cost far less than AWS or DigitalOcean, though sign-up ID checks are strict and recent price hikes upset people.415recommend
• exe.devSpins up SSH-accessible Linux VMs in seconds with a built-in coding agent and one-click public exposure; critics cite a confusing landing page, closed source and production-unfriendly limits.115recommend
• Hetzner CloudCheap, simple European cloud VMs with strong performance per euro and generous included bandwidth, though recent steep price increases have pushed some users to consider leaving.99recommend
• OVH hostingCheap, established European hosting provider that people use for VPS, servers and managed cloud; critics cite slow support, billing trouble and a buggy web UI.81recommend
• Amazon EC2People recommend EC2 for reliable servers, easy backups and patching, but critics say it often costs far more than a VPS or dedicated server.73recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 279 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: Azure, GCP, AWS Free Tiers or Something Else”

2. DigitalOcean is such a dream to use. I also really appreciate all their guides for almost everything web server related.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration”

3. most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”

4. I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

5. I think DigitalOcean was successful because we did a combination of: Actually useful content marketing

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots”

6. The UI is leagues better than AWS and there are really useful API endpoints to control common things.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

7. paying digital ocean about 30 dollars a month for 4 commercial websites with fully featured Postgres

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “PostgreSQL for Everything”

8. I switched to digital ocean last year and really haven't had to think about infrastructure again.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data - $1.7 BILLION”

9. its really nice to set up some hdd & cpu alerts from within cloud provider control panel directly

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Cloud VM benchmarks 2026: performance/price for 44 VM types over 7 providers”

10. I tried to warn them that they were hosting a phishing site once and they weren't very receptive.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month”

11. we just need a no frills experience instead of dealing with 27 nested panels just to spin up a VM

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?”

12. they need to focus strongly on following up on people's complaints about their existing services

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

13. what was revolutionary about that wasn't that you could spin up VMs quickly, it was the price

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out”

14. DigitalOcean is fantastic in my experience, way better than The Big Three, especially Azure.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.”

15. I've had nothing but good experiences with them and their docs and tutorials are excellent.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Railway GCP Account Suspension Incident Report”

16. Still an awesome service and platform.. but no longer worth it price wise as it once was.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

17. my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas”

18. I really liked Digital Ocean though, compared to more complex cloud offerings like AWS.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”

19. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”

20. Yeah overall they are ok. I think 3 times managed db and one or twice a vps just dead.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Railway GCP Account Suspension Incident Report”

21. If all you want is 1-2 VMs in the cloud and to not think about the rest, its great.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

22. DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?”

23. costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Have a Fucking Website”

24. I love Digital Ocean. The UI and the service itself is great. API is nice too.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

25. I found their product incredibly useful, well-designed, and easy to work with.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Railway GCP Account Suspension Incident Report”

26. Digital Ocean is below $20 per month that will serve many a small business.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse”

27. 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

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”

28. They occupy some weird middle ground where they've become too expensive for hobbyists but not good enough for enterprise use

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding”

29. DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”

30. Digital Ocean even withdrew funding from projects that didn't take DHH money, effectively punishing them for their stance.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: How can DigitalOcean not afford $50, but can afford $3M to Omarchy?”

31. AWS has way better peering agreements than DO. Lots of problems with terrible throughput and lots of dropped packets

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack”

32. capricious, inhumane, and uncaring about customer support, service terminations, and customer wind-down processes

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks”

33. I'm currently paying $800ish a month for digital ocean servers that I know would fit on a single hetzner machine

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”

34. most outages I had on linux was with my VPS was due to Digital Ocean issue with their own hardware failures

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “What the hell have you built”

35. Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal”

36. In fact that "cheap" competitor was able to give them better performance, more reliability and more features for a lot less.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

37. if you want to host the above (except the "bells and whistles" tier) yourself: Hetzner, Digital Ocean, etc.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner”

38. will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

39. They have been around a long long time and built a lot of the core infrastructure you rely on every day

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Railway GCP Account Suspension Incident Report”

40. Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “An Update on Heroku”