It's been a good choice for us for some services. We generally have several deployments. For instance, for some static Angular applications, it was a clear choice to run them on Cloudflare, which performs very well in this context. All the assets go on DigitalOcean.
Additionally, we already have a VPN with our solar farm in Italy. In terms of quality of service, it is fairly good.
The issue with DigitalOcean is primarily the latency. So, when you have a mixed system with some components staying here, and then we encounter network latency, it's not optimal. Our present Kubernetes installation, which has been running for three months, is on DigitalOcean.
However, we experience latency when communicating between the CRM server in Milano, our premises, and the cloud system.
Otherwise, with Google, we have three data centers, including one in Milano, so everything is much faster.
So, network latency could be improved in DigitalOcean.
I have been using DigitalOcean for three years now.
The main thing is that when you're betting your company on a cloud solution, you want to be sure you have reliable support. That's why we chose DigitalOcean over Google Cloud.
The support that we had from them was mostly really pretty good. But there is still room for improvement in support. We could get better local technical support from DigitalOcean.
We started using DigitalOcean based on word-of-mouth recommendations. DigitalOcean has been one of the early providers in the field, and I've been involved in internet setups since the early 1990s.
We liked the solution's history and expertise, and we've been working with them on some developments.
The initial setup was very friendly, and we had no major problems setting up things.
The deployment took a couple of weeks of full-time work. But before, we had to do all our own preparation in preparing, in moving to containerized applications and all these other things.
Then, when we were set, first, we did the test with systems in our office, and then we moved to DigitalOcean. Now, we have removed everything from Amazon. That's basically the savings that we have.
So, the process took a couple of weeks or so of setup, and this is no big deal. Now, once we have knowledge of what the matter is, containerized applications are so easy, much better than virtual machine handling and stuff like that by any Microsoft.
It's a learning curve, but then you go downhill. So now we are basically downhill. The learning curve for a company is that it took six months to start analyzing and moving the piece to the other piece and all the interconnection of subsystems. It includes the different containers of different kinds that you are deploying.
We had a team of five people for deployment.
I would rate DigitalOcean's pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is very expensive. They are competitive, but they are a bit on the pricey side.
Another area of improvement is support.
We haven't evaluated Azure yet, but it's certainly an option. At some point, we have to decide whether we want fish or meat, meaning we can't have everything. We may keep some services on DigitalOcean, and we'll see about pricing for Azure.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The only issue is the lack of local support.
