DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider purpose-built for developers, startups, and SMBs, offering a simplified IaaS and PaaS portfolio that covers everything from raw VMs (Droplets) to fully managed Kubernetes, databases, object storage, and an expanding AI-native compute stack. Unlike hyperscalers, DigitalOcean competes on developer experience and predictable pricing — flat-rate, bandwidth-pooled billing with up to 80% lower cost than AWS or Azure for equivalent workloads. A key mental model: every DigitalOcean product is scoped to a region (datacenter), and inter-region traffic costs money, so architecture decisions — especially around VPC, load balancer placement, and Spaces CDN — hinge on choosing the right region from the start.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 14 focused tables and 119 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Droplet Types and CPU Models
Droplets are DigitalOcean's Linux-based virtual machines, and choosing the right plan is the most fundamental decision on the platform. The core split is between shared CPU (Basic plan) and dedicated CPU (General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, Memory-Optimized, Storage-Optimized), each tuned for different workload profiles.
| Type | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
$6/mo — 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 25 GB SSD | • Shared hyper-thread • hypervisor dynamically allocates CPU based on demand. Best for bursty, low-to-medium traffic workloads — dev/test, blogs, small DBs, microservices | |
2–60 vCPU / 8–240 GB RAM; ~4:1 RAM:CPU ratio | • Dedicated CPU with 4 GB RAM per vCPU • best default for production web servers, SaaS apps, e-commerce, and medium-sized databases | |
2–60 vCPU / 4–120 GB RAM; ~2:1 RAM:CPU ratio | • Dedicated CPU with 2 GB RAM per vCPU • built for CPU-bound workloads — video streaming, gaming, CI/CD, AI/ML inference, heavily loaded frontends |