In 2022, cloud storage has become almost synonymous with the concept of data storage. According to Fortune Business Insights, the cloud storage market will grow from $76.43 billion in 2021 to $390.33 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 26.2%Opens a new window . The demand has set off intense competition, with the world’s largest tech companies vying for a slice of the pie. Here’s an in-depth comparison of two leading cloud storage solutions- DigitalOcean and Vultr – based on their feature-sets, pricing, functionalities, and more.
What is a Cloud Storage Solution?
Cloud storage systems range from personal storage (to store and back up emails, pictures, videos, and other personal files) to enterprise storage, allowing businesses to use cloud storage as a commercially supported remote backup solution for secure storage and transfer of data files or sharing them between locations.
A company can choose a cloud storage system based on its scalability and data storage requirements. Cloud-based storage is accessible from any place and is application-agnostic, allowing customers to access it from any device. The three main models of cloud storage available for business are – public cloud storage service suitable for unstructured data, private cloud storage service which can be protected behind a company firewall for more control over data; and hybrid cloud storage service which combines public and private cloud services for increased flexibility.
Let’s have a detailed look at two of the most sought-after cloud storage solutions – DigitalOcean and Vultr and decide a winner based on their respective features, strengths, functionalities, and ease of use.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting company that offers various services, including droplets or Virtual Private Servers. It’s like you own your virtual server, have the option of selecting your operating system during deployment, and can customize the VPS to your satisfaction.
The benefit is that you don’t have to worry about maintaining your hardware because your hosting company does it for you, and you can also automatically scale as needed.
Droplets (compute servers) and storage are the two main product categories offered by DigitalOcean. Droplets come in a variety of sizes and configurations. Based on their requirements, customers can either purchase a single CPU Droplet for $5 per month or up to 32 CPU servers powered by the latest Intel chips.
Aside from Droplets, DigitalOcean also offers various network services such as load balancers, firewalls, and DNS, each of which come with UIs, APIs, CLIs, and client libraries that may be used to control them.
Vultr
Vultr was established in 2014 and primarily offers cloud hosting plans. Vultr has served hundreds of thousands of customers and “spun up” over 30 MILLION cloud servers since its inception. Vultr is a rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure provider with 23 data centers worldwide and counting.
Headquartered in Matawan, NJ, Vultr is known for providing cloud servers with reliable SSD storage to over 200,000 customers in 150 locations worldwide. In the first two months of 2022, the company opened three new data centers in Madrid, Warsaw, and Melbourne. This powerful cloud platform intends to provide organizations and developers with cloud infrastructure and hosting services.
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Comparative Overview of Features Offered by DigitalOcean & Vultr
| Feature/Solution | DigitalOcean | Vultr |
|---|---|---|
| Storage Size | Non Customizable | Non Customizable |
| Server Size | 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 (in GB) | 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 96 (in GB) |
| Latency | 47.169 ms | 47.006 ms |
| Download Speed | 1319.01 Mbit/s | 288.73 Mbit/s |
| Upload Speed | 503.26 Mbit/s | 502.83 Mbit/s |
| DDOS Protection | No | Yes |
| Backups | Yes | Yes |
| Backstorage | Yes | Yes |
| Object Storage | Yes | Yes |
| SSH Keys Set Up | Yes | Yes |
| Hourly Billing | Yes | Yes |
| Control Panel | Built-in | Built-in |
| SSH Keys Setup | Yes | Yes |
| Total Number of Data Centers | 12 | 21 |
| Number of Data Center Continents | 3 | 4 |
| Monitoring Charts | Yes | Yes |
| Admin Rest API | Yes | Yes |
| Upgrade VPS from Admin Console | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile Friendly UI | Yes | Yes |
| Reverse DNS | No | Yes |
| Hidden CPU Model | No | Yes |
| Affiliate Program | Yes | Yes |
| Shelving | No | No |
| Firewall | No | Yes |
| Team Management | Yes | Yes |
Pricing
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean offers simple plans with defined resource restrictions to businesses. The company’s service plans are referred to as “droplets,” and they come with various features and add-ons. Standard droplets contain several characteristics that are beneficial for scaling applications.
- $ 5 per month for 1 core, 1 GB of RAM, 25 GB SSD, and 1 TB transfer
- $ 10 per month for 1 core, 2 GB of RAM, 50 GB SSD, and 2 TB transfer
- $ 20 per month for 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, and 4 TB transfer
To learn more about DigitalOcean pricing, read thisOpens a new window .
Vultr
Like DigitalOcean, Vultr also offers simple plans with defined resource restrictions, making the monthly cost predictable. Each of these plans comes with a variety of functions and add-ons. Here’s a look at the three basic pricing models:
- $ 5 per month for 1 core, 1 GB of RAM, 25 GB SSD, and 1 TB transfer
- $ 10 per month for 1 core, 2 GB of RAM, 50 GB SSD, and 2 TB transfer
- $ 20 per month for 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, and 3TB transfer
Vultr also provides a high-frequency server faster than the regular ones but costs a little more. High-frequency servers are helpful if you have a large site with millions of visitors or a large number of downloads. Learn more about Vultr pricing hereOpens a new window .
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DigitalOcean vs. Vultr: Key Features, Functionalities, and More
Both DigitalOcean and Vultr pack a lot of features, solutions, and add-ons for cloud storage. However, there are apparent differences in the services they offer. Below is a comparative study of DigiOcean vs.Vultr.
Products Offered
When choosing a web-hosting service, the first thing to look for is what products they provide. This is critical for the performance of your website because having a large number of products allows you to create a better-optimized and user-friendly site. You can also determine whether or not the features associated with your plans are beneficial to you. It’s pointless to pay for something you’re not going to use. It would be even better if your essential products were included as freebies with your chosen plan. Below, we’ll go over the features of each of these hosting plans so you can decide which one is best for you.
DigitalOcean offers the following products –
- Kubernetes
- Space
- App Platform
- Droplets
- Databases
On the other hand, Vultr offers the following products –
- Cloud Compute
- Bare Metal
- Dedicated Cloud
- Load Balancers
- Object Storage
- Block Storage
As we can see, both web hosting companies offer excellent services, making it tough to pick between them. The result is a tie between them and their product quality.
Storage
When it comes to storage, you don’t have to think much if you’re just getting started. Vultr and DigitalOcean both provide plenty of storage space to do basic activities. However, if your website suddenly becomes popular, your server should be able to handle the sudden flow of traffic and data.
Vultr’s entry-level model comes with 10GB of SSD storage, 512MB of RAM, and one CPU core. Vultr offers an intermediate-level package that includes 160GB SSD storage, 8GB RAM, and four CPU cores. DigitalOcean’s entry-level plan, by contrast, has 25GB SSD storage, 1GB RAM, and 1 CPU core.
In terms of storage capacity, DigitalOcean comes out on top. Alongside the competitive plans it offers, it also enables businesses to expand their storage as they grow.
cPanel
cPanel is an essential website management platform that helps site owners monitor and run their websites. For many traditional developers, cPanel makes a significant difference.
Both Vultr and DigitalOcean let users launch a cPanel application seamlessly. Through the application, business users can manage email accounts, databases, security settings, etc., and transfer files via the web-based file manager or FTP/SFTP/FTPS protocols.
It is pricing, however, where the two solutions differ. While businesses have to pay Vultr $15 to install the cPanel application, they can create a droplet for cPanel and WHM for free on DigitalOcean. However, Vultr offers a point-and-click interface to let users manage their websites and to transfer files seamlessly.
A cPanel function is quite helpful. When it comes to cPanel, though, I will give Vultr the edge over DigitalOcean because of its simplicity and user-friendly interface.
Bandwidth
Having sufficient bandwidth in cloud storage ensures that a website can seamlessly handle many users, traffic flow, and data exchange without suffering latency or outages. Through their basic bandwidth offerings, both Vultr and DigitalOcean enable customers to absorb thousands of users visiting a website at any given time.
DigitalOcean’s most basic offering can handle 50,000 users per month with 1GB of memory and a 25GB SSD. If your traffic exceeds the threshold, you’ll need to switch to an intermediate or premium plan, depending on how much traffic you’re generating.
Vultr’s best feature is that it clearly states its bandwidth restriction in its plans. Vultr’s entry-level plan offers 500GB of bandwidth. However, businesses can choose from 1TB, 2TB or 3 TB to up to 15TB bandwidth plans if they need to scale up to handle millions of website visitors.
Vultr is preferable to DigitalOcean because the limit is explicitly stated. Though these hosting services are outstanding, I favor Vultr because of their explicit bandwidth communication.
OS (Operating System) Support
Vultr charges $16 per month for both Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 variants, and customers can load any of them using their custom ISO option. You can’t just put any ISO in there, though. VirtIO drivers must be added to Windows ISOs, which is a relatively straightforward process explained here. You can’t upload an ISO directly from your PC to Vultr; instead, you must host it somewhere with a direct URL and a maximum size of 8GB. Customers can also use an iPXE chain URL or iPXE script for semi-automated or fully-automated deployment.
Vultr also provides the following official OS alternatives. There are a couple of long-term variations of each of these alternatives to pick.
Also, you can select from a selection of CentOS-based preset application installations.
Both provide backups, IPV6, and private networking. Customers also have the option of leveraging an internal IP in the virtual machine to allow high-speed communication between two instances located in close proximity.
DigitalOcean offers a good application selection but falls behind Vultr in this category as it does not provide a custom ISO and features fewer OS choices.
In terms of OS support, Vultr is the winner as shown above.
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Security
Cloud Firewalls are available from DigitalOcean and Vultr, allowing you to secure your data easily. They also provide six layers of protection as well as multi-factor authentication points. Physical security, infrastructure security, access logging, security monitoring, snapshot security, and backup security are all examples of these.
It is critical to realize that these firewalls will not protect you from large-scale attacks. Thus, if you wish to prevent your server from receiving a null route in the event of a major attack, you can acquire DDOS protection.
When a Vultr DDoS system detects an assault, it redirects traffic away from the server. Thanks to its automatic brilliance, it can detect assaults and successfully filter and clean traffic before it reaches your server.
Both vendors have gone to tremendous lengths to ensure the security of their users. Compared to DigitalOcean, Vultr’s DDoS is easier to understand and provides more protection. Hence Vultr is the winner in terms of security.
Support
Live chat, a knowledge base, and tutorials are all available through DigitalOcean’s exceptional customer support. Customer satisfaction is strong among those who use the company; the Better Business Bureau has given it an A+ rating.
Vultr is also known for its excellent customer service. They provide:
- Live chat support.
- A ticketing system for more detailed requests.
- There is a wealth of material on their website to answer any questions or issues you may have.
DigitalOcean ranks slightly higher than Vultr in terms of support. So, here the winner is DigitalOcean
Final Verdict
Although the prices for both basic servers are comparable, DigitalOcean offers additional possibilities. DigitalOcean has a more extensive data center network. The services of DigitalOcean and Vultr are comparable as both provide similar service level agreements and fees. The primary distinction is Digitalocean’s more excellent global data center dispersion. It wasn’t as tight a race as I had anticipated. I like DigitalOcean’s general products, and Vultr is an exception.
If you’re still undecided between Vultr and DigitalOcean, here’s my recommendation:
I admire how DigiOcean has simplified cloud server deployment for engineers like myself over the years. Not only that, but I’ve always found their pricing to be reasonable and straightforward. I’m hoping they keep improving the cloud experience for non-DevOps people. Look no further than DigitalOcean if you’re seeking the most straightforward and feature-packed cloud storage solution.
Disclaimer: Unless stated otherwise, any information provided in this review does not constitute a recommendation or endorsem*nt for the products listed in the article. All information in this article is provided in good faith; however, we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of products that are reviewed. The viewpoints expressed within the content are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views of Spiceworks Ziff Davis or its affiliates.
Edited by Jayant Chakravarti
Which of these two would you rate as your preferred cloud storage solution? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!
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