I'm a bit turned off by their (Digital Ocean) features page, in the SSD section, where they implied that SATA means traditional spindle-based HDDs. I kind of expect a cloud server host to know the proper terminology for these things. It's probably an editor's mistake but still...
Quote from Digital Ocean Features page: "With our SSD hard drives, you can expect much faster disk i/o performance when compared to a traditional storage medium (e.g. SATA)"
Can't really judge a service by their marketing. A company might have kick-ass benchmarks but a shitty site. Look at Linode. Their site design looks like it's still 2005.
I didn't even get to create a "droplet", the instance kept failing. I contacted support about a refund (I created the account to work on a small personal project for the weekend) and I was given the run-around, "there were issues and they were working on it", then they told me it was probably my issue (I forgot to "fill in a field"), etc. etc. Took 3 days to get my money back.
I'm sure it was an outlier since I've seen a decent amount of positive reviews, but support was terrible, and I think the way a company handles situations like this pretty telling.
Quote from Digital Ocean Features page: "With our SSD hard drives, you can expect much faster disk i/o performance when compared to a traditional storage medium (e.g. SATA)"