DigitalOcean

Compared to Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean seems to be very incomplete. DigitalOcean, until a few months ago only provided droplets, SSH key management, and DNS management. At the time of writing this, DigitalOcean has very recently launched an additional block storage service. The advantages of DigitalOcean compared to many competitors are:

• Lower prices than AWS

• Very easy APIs

• Very well documented APIs

• The droplets are very similar to standard virtual machines (they don't do weird customization)

• The droplets are very quick to go up and down

• Since DigitalOcean has a very simple networking stack, it's way more efficient than the AWS one

Droplets

Droplets are the main service offered by DigitalOcean and are compute instances which are very similar to Amazon EC2 classic. DigitalOcean relies on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to virtualize the machines, assuring very high performance and security. Since they do not change KVM in any sensible way, and since KVM is open source and available...