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DigitalOcean vs Wordpress.com vs Heroku

vs RamNode vs F(x) Data Cloud vs Ecobytes vs SiteGround vs Cloudways vs Bluehost vs WP Engine vs Flashdrive.io vs Blogcoli.com vs Cloudean Infotech

Specs

Server locations

New York (3); Amsterdam (2); San Francisco (2); Singapore; London; Frankfurt; Toronto; Bangalore

ISOs

Ubuntu; Fedora; Debian; CentOS; CoreOS; FreeBSD

Virtualization

KVM

IPv6

Yes

Custom ISO

Yes

Block Storage

Yes

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

PHP

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

Los Angeles; New York; Atlanta; Seattle; Amsterdam

ISOs

CentOS; CloudLinux; CoreOS; Debian; FreeBSD; OpenBSD; Fedora; openSUSE; Gentoo; Ubuntu; Arch; Alpine; NetBSD; Vyatta; MikroTik; GParted; System Rescue; Grml; Scientific; TurnKey; Elastix; Oracle; PBX; iPXE; NixOS; FreePBX; AsteriskNOW; Windows Server 2008 R2

Virtualization

KVM; OpenVZ

IPv6

Custom ISO

Yes

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

United States

ISOs

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Windows

Virtualization

KVM

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Yes

Technology

Uptime SLA

99.95%

Cloud Storage

Yes

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Virtualization

IPv6

Custom ISO

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Server locations

ISOs

Linux | Windows | FreeBSD

Virtualization

KVM | XEN

IPv6

Yes

Custom ISO

Yes

Block Storage

Technology

Uptime SLA

Yes

Cloud Storage

Cloud Locations

Cloudflare Railgun

Yes

Pros + Cons

Con
Terrible support

[add description]

Comment

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.

Comment

Pro
Competetive starter-level pricing

With pricing that starts at $5/month. It's a pretty cheap VPS provider.

Comment

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.

Comment

Pro
$50 credit for students

Available with the Github student developer pack.

Comment

Pro
Great customer support

Quick and knowledgeable customer service, extensive documentation and helpful community.

Comment

Pro
Pay-as-you-go with multiple payment options

Billing is done per hour. Each month has a 672 hour (28-day) billing cap with server runtime past that point being free of charge. DigitalOcean accepts payments via Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and PayPal.

Comment

Pro
Flexible backup mechanism

Automatic backups can be made for 20% of the droplet price and an unlimited amount of snapshots at $0.02 per GB of storage can be made manually.

Comment

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.

Comment

Pro
$10 Credit for Beginners via reference

[add description]

Comment

Pro
No need to setup anything

Platform provided by the developers of Wordpress and is fully compatible with Wordpress, the whole process is done through a web GUI interface in a couple of very simple steps.

Comment

Pro
Optional free hosting

WordPress offers free hosting under a wordpress.com subdomain. This option eliminates the need for setting up the CMS yourself and is reasonably secure, as WP uses multiple servers to back your site up. Additionally, for a fee, you can even set up your own custom domain name.

Comment

Con
Plugin support

Third-party plugin support requires a paid plan.

Comment

Pro
Excellent error logs

When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison.

Comment

Pro
Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies

Heroku has a vast list of plugins and services that can be added to an instance. These plugins cover things from databases to email systems. This remove the task of having to install services and setting them up manually. Heroku does it all for you.

Comment

Pro
Free option available

Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance and is available for up to 18 hours per day. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space.

Comment

Pro
Easy to start with

Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of git commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku docmentation also helps a lot.

Comment

Pro
Simple scaling

Heroku instances can easily be scaled up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that instance. This can be done through the CLI or through Heroku's web UI.

Comment

Con
Really expensive

Heroku starts getting really expensive once you leave that the tier. It's not just the bare Heroku service that is costly, the addons as well are very pricey.

Comment

Pro
Cheap

Ramnode is a very cheap VPS provider. With its cheapest plan being only $15/yr for 128MB of RAM. Which is not much but for a small website not expecting a lot of traffic is pretty good. Plus, not many other VPS providers offer this kind of option.

Comment

Pro
Good performance

RamNode usually has some pretty good performance according to benchmarks. Of course, VPS benchmarks are not very reliable but RamNode consistently ranks pretty high in them.

Comment

Con
Doesn't give you many advanced functionalities

Compared to other VPS providers, the Admin interface for RamNode is rather limited. For example, scaling your instances up and down is not as advanced.

Comment

Pro
High uptime

All the cloud services are with 99.95% uptime.

Comment

Pro
Basic plans starts from $1.99/month

1 vCPU, 512MB RAM, 10 GB SSD

Comment

Pro
Unlimited number of databases

Users can set as many databases as they want.

Comment

Con
Storage limit of 10GB

Every user can use up to 10GB of server storage.

Comment

Pro
Optimized and managed cloud servers

The optimization technique used is Nginx, Varnish, Apache, PHP-FPM, Memcache, MySQL, PHP 5.6. Provided is 4 options of servers, which are DigitalOcean, Vultr, GCE and AWS EC2. Each one of them uses the same optimization. It all comes with automated backups, 24/7 chat support, scalable cloud servers, and no restriction on WordPress sites.

Comment

Pro
Recommended by Wordpress.org

Bluehost is recommended by the official Wordpress team.

Comment

Con
Store passwords in plaintext

Bluehost has been found to store user passwords in plaintext in the past. This is one of the most basic security vulnerabilities that can be found in software. It also suggests that there may be even more security vulnerabilities which have not been found yet.