Yesterday, I came across Digital Ocean as a VPS provider, and started looking at the various features they offer in comparison with my current provider, Linode.
Straight off the mark, it was clear that Digital Ocean was cheaper, or that I’d get more RAM/Transfer for the same price. The way the CPU allocation works is a little different, however, as Linode offer CPU based on priority, whereas Digital Ocean’s droplets (their name for a VPS) are allocated cores. In the end, I decided if I was going to switch, I’d stay with something that was the same cost, and get a bit more for my money.
As the title suggests, I took the plunge today, and setup the server (again) this afternoon in a few hours. It didn’t take long to copy the content over from the Linode VPS, as I just did it using SCP directly on the servers.
One thing I really like about Digital Ocean is the control panel for the droplet; it’s a nice clean UI, and makes things exceptionally easy to use (the DNS page, for example, as shown on this page). The new VPS is running Ubuntu 12.04.4 as well, so copying things over was a pain-free experience… almost.
I use msmtp to send email from the server using Gmail; this is used solely for WordPress to be able to send out emails. I had this setup previously on the Linode VPS and it was all working as expected… not so on the new server. It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong, but I’ll write up a new blog post in the coming days about what I did to configure it, with my sample config, just so at least I’ll know myself if I come to do this again!
So far, I’m liking Digital Ocean, and what they have to offer. I’ll see how things go over the coming months, but from what I’ve experienced so far, I expect I’ll be very happy with the new server.