Hugo vs DigitalOcean
When comparing Hugo vs DigitalOcean, the Slant community recommends Hugo for most people. In the question“What are the best stacks/tools for hosting a personal site and blog?” Hugo is ranked 1st while DigitalOcean is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Hugo is:
Code can be viewed [on GitHub](http://github.com/spf13/hugo).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open-source and free
Code can be viewed on GitHub.
Pro Fast
Pro No dependencies
All other SSGs expect you to have a full toolchain setup for their language. Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable for unix, linux, windows and mac. Just download and run.
Pro Clean workflow
Create your new site, run the Hugo server, edit. Lather, rinse, repeat. Hugo stays out of the way.
Pro Flexible
Pro Good documentation
Pro Many themes available
Pro Draft mode
Allows you to see changes in real time.
Pro Single binary - cross platform
Pro Single source publishing
Can create PDFs, eBooks, RSS-Feeds, language and market specific Websites from single content folder.
Pro Great multipurpose development platform
We are using Hugo as the base-framework for a full blown knowledge management system, idea-management and inhouse brainstorming tool. Hugo source-code is well structures and comes with top components out of the box, that makes every solution built on this framework incredible fast and scalable accross platforms and corporate silos! Hugo - when being used as a framework is a game-changer that puts Sharepoint, Wordpress and Co. back to the shelf.
Pro Very active community
Pro Easy to add new content types, data files, and taxonomies
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 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.
Pro Competetive starter-level pricing
With pricing that starts at $5/month. It's a pretty cheap VPS provider.
Pro Extensive Tutorials/Guides
People can often find tutorials needed provided by DigitalOcean.
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 (New) Block Storage Volumes
You can now attach dynamic distributed (assuming SAN) storage to a droplet. Multiple droplets cannot attach to the same volume. The storage is very affordable and there are easy to follow how-to guides.
(as of writing, only in certain datacenters)
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.
Pro Great customer support
Quick and knowledgeable customer service, extensive documentation and helpful community.
Cons
Con No tutorial on how to create a theme from scratch
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 Limited payment options
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.
Con Limited Locations, compared to others
I know with many applications, locations are not always super important. However there are several good reason to have certain locations. Only having East Coast and West Coast happens to be an issue for us and a few of our partners.