I talk about Vercel a lot. Probably too much. They’re great for what they do—Next.js deployments, edge functions, the serverless stuff. But not everything fits the serverless model. Sometimes you need a server. An actual server that runs continuously, handles persistent connections, maybe runs PHP because your client’s legacy app requires it.
That’s where I found myself last fall. Client project. Laravel application handling webhook callbacks from a payment processor. Required persistent connections and background job processing. Vercel wasn’t going to cut it.
Where Railway and Vercel Don’t Reach
Railway was my first thought. I’ve used it before, and the developer experience is genuinely good. Automatic vertical scaling, nice preview environments, all that modern stuff. But Railway’s primarily built for building—you push code, it builds and deploys. When you need a broader set of management tools and services, they’re not quite there. And the pricing gets weird fast for anything running 24/7. Their $5 trial credit evaporates if you’re not careful.
Traditional cPanel hosting—Hostgator, Bluehost, the whole gang—exists in a completely different universe. Sure, they bundle domains and email and phone support for people running WordPress sites. But the performance is mediocre, the interfaces feel like 2008, and the moment you want to do anything slightly unusual, you’re fighting the system.
Digital Ocean sat on my radar for years. I knew about it vaguely. Then this Laravel project forced me to actually look.
The difference from cPanel hosting is immediate: full SSH access, real package management, actual networking controls instead of web forms that generate .htaccess files. You’re working with a Linux server, not a managed WordPress environment pretending to be one.
More Than Droplets Now
You deploy servers as droplets—KVM-based virtual machines running on their hypervisor infrastructure. Basic droplets start at $4/month (as of early 2025) for 512MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB SSD. Nothing fancy, but enough to run a small PHP app. The $6 tier doubles everything. Straightforward.
But the droplet thing isn’t what impressed me. Digital Ocean has quietly built out a whole platform while I wasn’t paying attention:
App Platform: Git-based deployment starting at $5/month. Push to main, it builds and deploys. Less polished than Vercel for frontend stuff, but handles backend services Vercel can’t touch.
Managed databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis-compatible Valkey. The PostgreSQL offering starts around $15/month (pricing varies by region) with daily automatic backups and 7-day point-in-time recovery. Real managed services, not “here’s a VM, figure it out.”
Spaces: S3-compatible object storage at $5/month including 250GB storage, 1TB transfer, and a built-in CDN. Compare that to AWS S3’s calculator nightmare.
Block storage: NFS-attachable volumes at $0.10/GiB/month. Mount additional storage to droplets without rebuilding.
Kubernetes: Free control plane. That’s not a typo. AWS EKS charges $72/month for the control plane alone before you add worker nodes.
Marketplace: One-click deployments for WordPress, Ghost, MongoDB, Redis, dozens of others. Not as extensive as AWS but covers most common needs.
The breadth was surprising. This isn’t just VPS hosting anymore.
doctl and Agent-Friendly Infrastructure
Here’s where it gets relevant for anyone doing agentic development: doctl works well.
Digital Ocean’s CLI covers the full platform—droplets, databases, Kubernetes clusters, app deployments, DNS, firewalls, load balancers. Written in Go. 3.4k GitHub stars. Installs via Homebrew, Snap, or direct download.
More importantly, it plays well with AI coding assistants. The command structure is predictable enough that Claude Code and similar tools can figure out what you’re trying to do. doctl compute droplet create does what you’d expect. doctl apps create --spec app.yaml deploys from a declarative config. JSON output works by default for parsing.
The GitHub Action for doctl makes CI/CD integration straightforward. Push code, build container, deploy to Kubernetes—all scriptable, all agent-friendly.
One limitation: doctl doesn’t handle Spaces directly. You need s3cmd or the AWS CLI for object storage operations. Annoying but workable.
The Pricing Reality Check
Digital Ocean’s pricing philosophy differs fundamentally from AWS. You know what something costs before you provision it. As one AWS consultant put it: “If you hire me to optimize your DigitalOcean bill, you’re effectively paying me to perform basic arithmetic. AWS surprises are on the order of ‘15 grand because you drastically misunderstood something.’”
That said, the pricing gets less competitive at scale. Higher-tier instances and managed databases draw criticism for being expensive compared to self-hosting. Load balancers at $12/month minimum can quadruple the cost of a small droplet setup. Block storage keeps charging even when unattached—found that out the hard way.
Quick comparison for context (early 2025 pricing):
Service Digital Ocean AWS Equivalent Basic VM $4/month EC2 t3.nano: ~$3.80/month Kubernetes control plane Free EKS: $72/month (control plane only) Object storage (250GB) $5/month S3: Variable, plus egress Managed PostgreSQL ~$15/month RDS: ~$13-15/month minimum
The Kubernetes control plane pricing alone makes Digital Ocean worth considering if you’re running containers. But note that AWS offers different operational trade-offs—more regions, more compliance certifications, more mature tooling.
Managed Services: Where It Gets Messy
My research turned up some concerning Hacker News threads from January 2025. A startup founder described a late-night emergency where Digital Ocean’s managed PostgreSQL and managed Kubernetes stopped talking to each other after an infrastructure update. VPC routing broke. Cilium ARP entries went stale.
Another developer flagged that managed PostgreSQL replicas use async replication with RPO potentially exceeding 15 minutes. During upgrades that trigger failover, you can lose minutes of committed data. Not ideal for anything handling money.
The counterargument from the same thread: “We were on AWS for a while. The complexity was way higher than what our team could manage. DOKS is simpler, and this is the first major issue we’ve hit in many months.”
Managed doesn’t mean worry-free. It means trading your failure modes for the vendor’s failure modes. Whether that trade makes sense depends on your ops capacity.
Digital Ocean’s AI Bet
Digital Ocean launched their GenAI Platform in January 2025. Function calling, RAG, guardrails, multi-agent coordination. They claim support for multiple foundation models including Claude, GPT-4, Llama, Mistral, and DeepSeek—though the exact integration depth (API passthrough vs. hosted inference vs. marketplace images) varies. Their AI/ML ARR reportedly grew over 200% year-over-year in 2024.
More relevant for agentic development: they’ve announced MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. The pitch is that AI assistants like Claude can connect directly to your Digital Ocean account for autonomous infrastructure provisioning. I haven’t tested this yet, so I can’t vouch for how well it actually works in practice.
GPU Droplets launched in October 2024 with NVIDIA H100 access. Announced pricing starts around $1.50/GPU/hour for reserved instances, with per-second billing reportedly coming in early 2026. Worth verifying current rates before committing.
Digital Ocean clearly sees agentic development as a growth vector. The combination of simpler infrastructure, predictable costs, CLI tooling, and MCP integration makes sense strategically—whether it translates to production-ready capabilities is still an open question for teams at the bleeding edge.
Who This Actually Fits
Digital Ocean makes sense for:
Solo developers and small teams needing a deployment target for AI-generated code
Startups wanting predictable costs without AWS complexity
PHP, Python, Ruby, Go applications that don’t fit the serverless model
Teams escaping Heroku after the free tier changes
Anyone running Kubernetes who doesn’t want to pay $72/month for a control plane
Projects that need object storage, managed databases, AND compute in one place
Digital Ocean doesn’t make sense for:
Windows-based deployments (not supported)
Enterprise compliance requirements beyond HIPAA
Complex multi-region architectures needing 50+ global regions
Teams requiring 24/7 phone support
What I Shipped
The PHP project that sent me here? Running on a droplet with managed MySQL. Total monthly cost around $22. The setup wasn’t completely smooth—spent about an hour fighting with UFW firewall rules that kept blocking the database connection even after I’d supposedly allowed the right ports. Turned out I needed to allow the VPC subnet, not just the specific IP. The docs mentioned this but buried it three pages deep.
No surprise bills though. The client’s happy. Sometimes that’s enough.
I’m Bob Matsuoka, writing about agentic coding and AI-powered development at HyperDev. For more on deployment options and developer tooling, check out my analysis of What’s In My Toolkit - August 2025 or my deep dive into multi-agent orchestration patterns.
Incredibly thorough breakdown of the DO ecosystem! The bit about predictable pricing vs AWS's 'surprise 15 grand bills' resonates deeply, but Im curious how you weigh that against the managed service reliability issues you flagged. Ran into similiar VPC routing nightmares with another provider once and the cost savings evaporated real quick. That tradeoff between simplicity and stability is tricky to get right.