I started using DigitalOcean back in January to host a Ghost blog. I was a little worried at first because I didn't have too much experience setting up servers. There was always the option of a full service company that does all the work for you, but the point was that I wanted more control for the purpose of learning. And, learning turned out to be really easy thanks to the great community at DigitalOcean. There are tutorials for just about anything. It has been an amazing learning experience, and now I'm looking forward to hosting more complex projects here. I already have a couple in the works for the near future. I highly recommend it.

I can't rate the Support great or bad, as I haven't really had a need to contact them yet. But everything else has been excellent so far.

A VPS gives the full access that I need, because most of what I do has complex integrations and there is plenty of legacy - very stable, highly tuned code developed over two decades - that I carry with me. My use is also limited to during development, so there is no point going for a full server.

Amazon EC2 is a VPS, except it is cheaper.

Additionally, I used to previously take the code developed on my VPS and deploy it to whatever server the client brought.

With Amazon EC2 the deployment is already done. All that remains it to scale up, add other products like dns, mail, storage and so on, and change the billing so that the client gets invoiced. That makes the process that much more predictable and seamless, and the end result much more stable.

I am a freelancer and a researcher. I have had tried a lot of hosting services over the years. But DIgitalOcean stands out from the rest for its pricing. Its just five dollar a month for a basic node.

And the other reason for loving Digital Ocean is that they support Docker. It you buy a VPS machine, chances are that docker support wont be available as with PV or hypervisor, docker need some extra config.

So far I am loving DO :-)

I use DigitalOcean for testing or hosting my apps. You can set up an Ubuntu server in less than a minute. There are also one-click-install apps, so I don't have to install e.g. the LAMP stack myself. The dashboard has a really easy UI and is easy to use. The costs begin at 5 bucks per month. Also DigitalOcean has a great support and an adorable community. They have a great support page with hundreds of tutorials.

Just started using EC2 myself, but it was the platform used by my previous employer, as well. They are getting easier to use, dashboard improvements over time were well done. Responded fast to outages. They offer a limited free tier which is perfect for my current project, allowing me time to build it to the point where I will need a paid solution. Overall, I'm liking it so far.

We are using HP Horizon for thecustomizewindows.com since November 2014. It seems to be the most cost effective and powerful IaaS service among the standard OpenStack cloud providers.