Reliable startup hosting in minutes

What is web hosting? What is cloud hosting?

Web hosting is a service provided by web hosting providers that enables your website or application to be made available on the internet. When you sign up for a web hosting service, you’re essentially renting out space on the service provider’s servers to store, manage, and deploy all your website’s files, data, traffic, etc.

Cloud hosting is often used interchangeably with web hosting, as most startups who need web hosting use cloud providers for this hosting (i.e. renting the server space) rather than a startup buying, managing, and using their own physical servers on their own business premises.

If you want to launch a website or an application that is available to the public or users over the internet, you’ll need web hosting/cloud hosting and will need to pay for a hosting service or hosting services from a web hosting provider.

What is a virtual private server?

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine that provides an application’s computing power as a portion of a larger physical server. With virtual private server hosting (VPS hosting), your startup will get dedicated server space with a pre-determined and reserved amount of computing resources on a larger physical server.

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is a common way that many early-stage startups and small businesses deploy their websites online. Shared hosting allows multiple applications across many small businesses to leverage the same cloud server. Your computing resources will be separate from others on your shared server, so each user of the shared server/shared hosting will have total privacy from one another—you won’t even know who else is sharing your server with you (and those other small businesses won’t know you’re on their server either).

Shared hosting allows for economies of scale, making your cloud hosting cheaper for your needs. It is common for a web hosting provider to offer shared hosting services as well as having options for a dedicated hosting plan (DigitalOcean offers both).

What is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure company that offers many cloud services that can help you build, deploy, scale, and manage your startup online. We offer cloud hosting/web hosting services, shared hosting, a dedicated IP address for the virtual machines you spin up, dedicated servers/ dedicated hosting, managed databases through our data centers, automatic backups, private networking, many security features (such as SSL certificates), a responsive support team, and much more.

We pride ourselves on being a web hosting company with incredible cloud hosting products and services that will empower your business to take full advantage of cloud computing in a user-friendly way (that doesn’t necessarily require deep technical knowledge). Many of our cloud computing products and services come with great paid and free features with dedicated resources to help small businesses succeed.

Does DigitalOcean offer a free domain name with purchase?

DigitalOcean does not offer a free domain with our cloud hosting services. Most web hosting companies don’t offer a free domain with purchase, especially hosting services focused on providing cloud infrastructure services for your startup. With DigitalOcean you’ll get many benefits beyond a free domain name.

Other website providers, like WordPress, offer a basic free domain with sign-up. Free WordPress services can be a great alternative for getting started with a new business and our Cloudways product supports managed hosting for WordPress.

If you want WordPress hosting, but don’t want managed WordPress hosting, DigitalOcean also offers a one-click wordpress installation option on our virtual machines, Droplets.

Whether you get your WordPress hosting through Cloudways or DigitalOcean, we offer affordable and reliable WordPress hosting plans with easy WordPress installation and performant WordPress hosting.

If you want scalable solutions for your web applications on WordPress, check out our managed services and cloud platform.

Does DigitalOcean provide a money back guarantee?

It is atypical for hosting services to provide a money back guarantee. You won’t see a money back guarantee among the most popular web hosting services or web hosting providers. Generally, one should be wary of these money back guarantees for this reason.

While DigitalOcean does not offer a money back guarantee, we do offer free credit for DigitalOcean and Cloudways for new customers.

Does DigitalOcean offer unlimited bandwidth or unlimited storage?

While you can purchase a lot of bandwidth and storage with one of our many hosting plans, we hesitate to claim that we offer unlimited bandwidth or unlimited storage. Cloud hosting platforms that make this claim should be approached cautiously, as cloud servers will always have limitations that a web host will need to consider.

Check out our many hosting plans on DigitalOcean and Cloudways to learn more about the many benefits we offer to those using our cloud servers and trust us as their web host.