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Add to SafariWhen comparing Google Cloud Platform vs DigitalOcean, the Slant community recommends DigitalOcean for most people. In the question“What are the best VPS providers?” DigitalOcean is ranked 1st while Google Cloud Platform is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose DigitalOcean is:
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](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials) for people new to VPS.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro TPUs
Tensor Processing Units are bare-metal units designed to train your Machine Learning models faster. This is exclusive only to Google Cloud Platform.
Pro Free tier
GCP gives your 365 days of free trial and 300 US$ credit including a Always Free if you upgrade.
Pro Live-migrating VMs
Your VMs will still run even if there is a maintenance work going on to the tenant running your VM - thanks to Google's Live-migration system.
Pro Clear IAM roles
Unlike most Enterprise-grade IAM role systems, GCP has a clearer IAM permissions model, with Azure following.
Pro First-class Kubernetes support
Kubernetes is a project from Google's Borg. GCP is the first Kubernetes-Certified infrastructure.
Pro Secure and efficient to the core
Google datacenters are built with minimal security issues in mind while still reducing carbon footprint, making Google datacenters a much more greener infrastructure than competitors.
Pro Runs on the same infrastructure with Google's Services
Google's datacenters runs your favorite video streaming services and even Google itself. Discord also relies on GCP to handle its workloads.
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 Expensive
GCP might be cheaper than AWS but it is more expensive than Azure. The main reason for this might be because of the extensive investment done for datacenters being efficient and green and secure.
Con Live Migrating VMs does not apply to GPU-attached VMs
Because this kind of VMs has a direct passthrough to the Processing Unit, this is not available and restart only will be available for the VM attached.
Con Unstable Egress/Ingress
Google Cloud Platform is a bit unstable with its egress and ingress. You may receive subtle blips when maintenance work is being carried on the routing.
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.
Con Terrible support
