When comparing DigitalOcean vs GitLab Pages, the Slant community recommends DigitalOcean for most people. In the question“What are the best hosting solutions for personal websites/blogs?” DigitalOcean is ranked 4th while GitLab Pages is ranked 7th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 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.
Pro Easy to setup
Gitlab pages are quick and simple to setup, with documentation that's short and fast to read through.
Pro Regular updates
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month.
Pro Free private repositories
On gitlab.com you can have free private repositories.
Pro Open Source
Unlike BitBucket or GitHub, GitLab itself is Open Source. Even EE (which is needed for pages, but is free on Gitlab.com) is "source available".
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 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.