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What Are the Main Benefits of Using DigitalOcean for Web Application Hosting?

What are the key features and advantages of using DigitalOcean’s cloud platform for hosting and managing web applications?


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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October 8, 2024
Accepted Answer

Hey! 👋

DigitalOcean offers a lot of great benefits for hosting web applications, especially if you’re looking for simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Developer-Friendly

DigitalOcean’s platform is designed with developers in mind. The UI is clean, and everything from spinning up a Droplet (their virtual machines) to managing DNS and storage is straightforward. Plus, they have one-click apps for popular tools like WordPress, LAMP, and Node.js.
Getting Started with Droplets

This also includes DigitalOcean API as well!

Affordable Pricing

One of the things that many developers love about DigitalOcean is the pricing. With plans starting as low as $4 per month, it’s budget-friendly, especially for startups or small projects. You only pay for what you use, with no hidden costs or complex pricing structures.
DigitalOcean Pricing

You can also use the pricing calculator to calculate how much exactly you will be paying thanks to the DigitalOcean predictable pricing unlike some other cloud provider:

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/calculator

Scalability

As your app grows, you can easily scale your infrastructure. With Droplets, you can resize your instance, add more storage, or even set up load balancers to handle more traffic seamlessly.
How to Scale Your Droplets

If you are using Kubernetes or the DigitalOcean App Platform you can even setup auto-scaling:

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-cpu-based-autoscaling-app-platform

High Performance

DigitalOcean uses SSD storage across all Droplets, which gives faster read/write speeds and overall performance. This is great for web apps that need to handle a lot of requests quickly. You can also choose a CPU optimized plan if your app requires more CPU power.

You can check out this guide on how to choose the best plan for your needs:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/concepts/choosing-a-plan/

Managed Databases

If you’re running a database-heavy application, DigitalOcean offers managed databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis). You don’t need to worry about backups, updates, or scaling—DigitalOcean handles all of that for you.
Managed Databases Overview

App Platform

The DigitalOcean App Platform is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that lets you build, deploy, and scale apps without managing the underlying infrastructure. It supports popular languages like Python, Node.js, and Go, and also lets you deploy directly from GitHub or GitLab.
App Platform Overview

Excellent Documentation & Community

DigitalOcean’s documentation is amazing, with step-by-step tutorials for almost anything you need to do. Als you can use the active community here and can ask any questions that you might have and share solutions with other developers.
DigitalOcean Community

Global Data Centers

With data centers around the world, you can host your app closer to your users to reduce latency and improve performance.
Data Center Regions

Security

DigitalOcean provides free SSL certificates (via Let’s Encrypt) and offers Cloud Firewalls to manage traffic to your Droplets. You can easily configure security rules to keep your app safe from threats. You also get free DDoS protection with most products.

DigitalOcean Security

Let me know if you need more details about any specific feature!

- Bobby

KFSys
Site Moderator
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October 10, 2024

Heya,

Apart from what has already been said, I’ll give a little less structured approach.

DigitalOcean gives you the tools you need to create your Application and run it however you like, whether it’s on a managed service or one that you manage, you have a choice.

Additionally, the community is quite big and you can always seek help in the forums even for your app.

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