For many years, DigitalOcean has been a favorite among developers when it comes to hosting web apps and projects. Having started back in 2011, it started seeing a more significant increase in growth after 2013. It was then that DigitalOcean started offering SSD-based virtual machines as a cloud hosting service.

DigitalOcean has focused on transforming the way individual, enterprise, and entrepreneurial developers host right from the get-go, and it has come a long way. It has provided its many users with an easier way to take care of their development infrastructure without the need for constant personal maintenance on their own side. And it has done this simply through providing cloud hosting.

Still, some of its users eventually outgrow DigitalOcean and look for alternatives. This can happen for plenty of reasons — searching for better pricing, improved functionality, and greater storage capacity are some of the motivations you could have for looking into switching away from DigitalOcean.

But, since finding an alternative can be time-consuming, we did the legwork for you and compiled a shortlist of the best DigitalOcean alternatives. Much like DigitalOcean, these also offer VPS cloud hosting services.

How These DigitalOcean Alternatives Compare To Traditional Hosting

When looking for hosting options and alternatives, bear in mind there are different kinds that suit different needs. DigitalOcean provides cloud hosting, which has recently become far more popular than the more traditional web hosting.

The main difference between cloud and traditional hosting is in the servers at your disposal.

If you go for a traditional web hosting, you get a single server to host your web project. Depending on what kind of traditional hosting you chose, usually, it can either be a dedicated hosting server only for you or a shared hosting where other web projects are hosted on the same server as your own.

Cloud hosting services, on the other hand, host your projects on multiple servers at the same time. All these servers are synchronized with each other so that they can ensure your website doesn't experience downtime even if one of them has technical issues, for example.

One of the major advantages this kind of hosting has over traditional hosting is the added flexibility.

If the server has to undergo maintenance, hosting will be temporarily disabled when it comes to traditional hosting, but not with cloud hosting. Some bigger companies still opt for maintaining traditional dedicated servers for their sites, but for anyone else, the added flexibility provided by cloud hosting makes it a far more popular choice.

Having your project hosted on multiple servers also eases the workload on them, and provides better security in general. When buying cloud services, the payment options are also more flexible than traditional hosting, because you usually pay for what you use instead of a fixed amount of storage and processing.

Without further ado, let’s go through our list of DigitalOcean alternatives that offer cloud hosting.

1. SSD Nodes

It’s only appropriate to start the comparison by talking about SSD Nodes. Obviously – we are a bit biased but SSD Nodes truly does have a number of advantages that make it stand out as one of, if not, the best DigitalOcean alternative.

First things first – value for money. SSD Nodes is a more affordable alternative to DigitalOcean's Droplets, you get far more bang for your buck when you compare the resources you get for $ invested, and that’s also applicable for some of the other alternatives on this list.

SSD Nodes’ hosting options are rich in features and ensure there won’t be any downtime in case of technical issues.

The security options provided by SSD Nodes include two-factor identification and fraud protection. The key kernel optimizations improve the overall speed as well. SSD Nodes’ worldwide KVM-based platform includes dozens of server locations, which makes for great global performance.

SSD Nodes also has a responsive customer support team that can answer all of your questions in detail. And the team responds fast, usually in a matter of hours.