I must say, without a doubt, that Digital Ocean is one of the best companies available for hosting services. This is not a sales pitch, but an actual account of what has happened since I joined them over a year ago.
Who are they?
Digital Ocean is a VM Hosting Company that specializes in offering SSD-backed servers for $5/mo. Sure, this got you a basic VM with 512 MB of RAM and a 20GB volume, but for the basics, this is more than enough. I had a VM running within 1 minute of asking for it, and the speed has been more than enough.
Last year, I offered to make a website for BC Mainland Division, which is the provincial governing body for the Navy League of Canada, within BC. I wanted to run it on its own dedicated server, just in case something happens to me (Hit By A Bus scenario). After looking at different hosting companies, I was turned to Digital Ocean.
The setup
I spun up a new Debian Jessie VM, installed my packages required, and had the website running later that afternoon. It was very fast, and seemed very reliable. I was able to follow a user-made tutorial for installing WordPress on a VM at Digital Ocean, and it could not have been made any easier!
As well, for a measly 20% extra per month, they would take weekly backups of your image. 20% of $5 was $1 – quite an easy sell! I like my backups, but what’s one more? Their backup would be a one-click-restore if something went wrong with the site. My goal was to make everything EASY for my users.
So what happened?
This morning, I received an email explaining that I was over billed! Oh no!
Reading the email, they acknowledged an error on their end – being billed 31-days worth of backups, instead of 28-days worth for October. While a small amount, many companies would just keep doing it until someone complained – But Digital Ocean didn’t! They stepped up, admitted their fault, and explained how they were going to rectify the issue in the future!
I am impressed; this kind of behaviour is unheard of with large companies! Since their email ended with “Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or concerns…”, I decided to reply:
DO Support,
I appreciate how upfront your company is about errors, whether your fault or not, and I think that is one of the best reasons for why I stay with, and recommend, Digital Ocean. A company that is willing to do what is right, even if they lose any extra profit they may have earned by “errors”, is all right in my books!
Thanks again for being awesome!
They made me happy, and I wanted them to know that. What I didn’t expect was an email back less than an hour later from Nate:
Hey there,
Thanks for contacting us today.
We do appreciate your great comments here! We do value honesty and are glad to be able to correct issues like these. Your comments made my day and as such I have thrown some credit your way! 🙂
Have a great rest of your day!
Best Regards,
Nate
I logged in, and saw the credit! So THANKS, DIGITAL OCEAN! I will continue to recommend your services as long as they remain as awesome as they’ve been over the past year!