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.

I use Heroku, for almost any project of mine. Their free plan is awesome for testing, solo developers or your startup and its almost impossible to not cover you somehow. Adding an add on is a simple command away and I find it easy to use it both on my Windows PC or my Linux laptop. Their documentation, covers almost everything. In particular I have used Heroku for Spring, Django and AngularJS. I even find it easier to run my project on my local dev with foreman start, than ./manage.py runserver (for my django projects). There is no place like Heroku for the developer!

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 :-)

Can't beat the simplicity of deploying and managing apps, the pricing is a bit high, but you are paying for those streamlined tools. However, after several experiences of tracing issues back to Heroku's stack, not having visibility into what they are doing has prompted moving two applications off of it and on to other more transparent cloud solutions. Heroku is amazing for what it is, hosting for early stage products.

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.

I've been using Heroku for 3 years now, they have grown super fast and each time they're improving their services. What I really like the most is how easily you can show to your client the advances on you project, it would take you maximum 15 minutes to configure two environments (Staging/Production). It is simply essential and fantastic!

I liked how easy this was to use and that I could create some proof of concepts without have to pay. The downside for NodeJS is remote debugging. Pretty much have to depend on logging where Azure allows remote debugging with Node Inspector.

Using Heroku takes away all the pains associated with managing compute and backing services. It may require a little extra optimisation and tweaks, but these constraints often make your app better anyway.