Recs.
Updated
- Virtualization: KVM
- Linux servers: Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS
- Non-Linux servers: FreeBSD & custom
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Beginner-friendly
DigitalOcean has a control panel that's intuitive and easy to use, new servers (Droplets) can be spun up in under a minute and they offer stock "apps" (LAMP, RoR, Wordpress) that can be deployed instantly. There's also an extensive documentation for people new to VPS.
Pro Good API
DigitalOcean has an API for creating and destroying droplets and replicating droplet control panel functionality. The API is RESTful, uses oAuth, supports IPv6 and comes with an extensive documentation.
Pro Great customer support
Quick and knowledgeable customer service, extensive documentation and helpful community.
Cons
Con No DDoS protection
When Digital Ocean detects what they think may be a DoS attack, they will cut traffic to the droplet to avoid performance drops to neighbors etc. This means if your droplet comes under attack, or appears to be under attack, it will be disconnected from the network, effectively down.
Con Setup is not as fast as advertised
A person who wants to set this up, set that up, configure this and so forth - and who has minimal time pressures would be okay. But the time it takes to be set up can be crucial for people who want to get up and running as fast as possible.
Con Don't accept Bitcoin yet
Even though it's one of the most voted suggestions on their customer feedback website, DigitalOcean does not accept any crypto-currency payment methods.
Recommendations
Comments
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con No load balancing solution yet
Work on load balancing was announced January 11th, 2015. Digital Ocean now offers "floating" IP addresses that can be bound to any droplet in the same datacenter. Otherwise, load balancing is often implemented by the user on a droplet via haproxy / nginx / etc.