Been there, done that. After using 10 different hosting providers over the past 10 years, I decided to move to a more flexible, upgradeable solution and went looking for a cloud-based hosting provider. For Windows solutions the licensing was going to raise the cost anyway, so I decided to go Unix all the way. A cached AdSense ad in my search results led me to DigitalOcean.
I managed to deploy a cloud server in less than a minute, with a dedicated IP and root SSH access, for the cost of just $5/month — a crazy price for SSD-backed servers back then. The part I liked most was the speed, plus you could add swap space to stretch the small RAM and still get decent performance. There were some performance tests comparing it to Linode here (the original post is offline now; that’s a Wayback Machine copy). DigitalOcean also had a good support library. This blog was hosted there.
Reading this in 2026
Thirteen years later, the “they are here to stay” call aged well: DigitalOcean is a multi-billion-dollar public company (NYSE: DOCN), the low-end droplet still costs a few dollars a month, and the lineup grew into managed databases, App Platform and Kubernetes. My advice today would be a little different, though:
- Never run a fresh droplet on a root password. Add an SSH key and disable password authentication before anything else touches the internet — it’s the first thing any exposed-SSH scanner looks for. DO’s own security basics push exactly this (docs.digitalocean.com: add SSH keys).
- Swap is a safety net, not RAM. It keeps a small server from OOM-crashing, but if your workload actually lives in swap the disk will throttle you. Outgrow the droplet instead of out-swap’ing it (DO tutorial: adding swap).
- The 2013 benchmarks were single-core vs four-core. The early $5 droplet competed well on disk I/O but not on CPU; the pricing gap closed years ago, and Linode (now Akamai Cloud) is still a comparable alternative.
- Snapshot before big changes. A droplet snapshot before a distro upgrade is the cheapest insurance in hosting.