I often get asked if DigitalOcean also offers a managed hosting service. More and more people notice the major cloud providers like DigitalOcean and see their cheap pricing. So they wonder if they could move their website from expensive hosting companies to DigitalOcean.
The short answer is: No they don’t offer managed hosting. But read further, there is a good way for a reasonable managed hosting on DigitalOcean platform.
What is Managed Hosting?
Today the term managed hosting is over-extensively used by lot’s of hosting companies. But in general it means, the hosting company manages the physical hardware and all software components of their servers and sells a secured environment with different plans to it’s customers.
As a customer you don’t have to do maintenance tasks like security updates of the server stack. You get a preconfigured environment with a webinterface like cPanel. Here you can install your favorite content management system or blogging platform like WordPress.
You just have to update your used website system but you don’t need to deal with anything of the server stack or firewall configurations. There are lot’s of tasks under the hood which the hosting company does for your. This is why most managed hosting plans come at a price.
DigitalOcean doesn’t offer Managed Droplets
In my experience DigitalOcean is a very good infrastructure provider. Their virtual servers are called Droplets and the smallest ones are quite cheap. But you must understand that these are so called root servers. This means you get a blank Linux machine and need to setup everything yourself.
To host a website you need a webserver like Apache, a scripting interpreter like PHP and a database server like MySQL. These are the minimum components you would need to setup yourself when spinning up a DigitalOcean Droplet. And of course you need to secure your root server against bad actors, monitor server logs and install security updates as soon as possible.
By that time DigitalOcean itself offers managed databases but they don’t offer a managed hosting plan. But there are third-party companies bringing the managed service to DigitalOcean platform.
Managed Hosting on DigitalOcean Infrastructure
These three companies offer some kind of management for DigitalOceans great infrastructure.
- ServerPilot
- RunCloud
- Cloudways
ServerPilot and RunCloud
Both services offer a separate control panel which connects to your DigitalOcean Droplet. It is a server management platform which helps to automate tasks on your root servers. But for a single website this connected setup seems a little oversized so I would not recommend these solutions to webmasters without any deeper IT knowledge.
Cloudways
In my experience Cloudways has a perfect solution to get a manged hosting on infrastructure providers like DigitalOcean. You just need to signup for their service and they spin up and connect to a DigitalOcean Droplet in the background. You don’t need to deal with two separate services here.
They automatically install their managed server stack and keep it updated and secure. All hosting settings can be done in the Cloudways backend. Of course they charge a little more than a Droplet costs directly but in my experience this is a very reasonable price for a managed hosting service.