DigitalOcean shaped the modern developer cloud. They made hourly billing feel obvious, published a clean API early, and built the tutorial library half the internet learned Linux from. Asking "why not just use DO?" is fair, and we should answer it honestly.
This is written by RareCloud, keep the bias in mind. The numbers below are factual (from public pricing pages, checked on 8 October 2026, excluding VAT); the opinions are ours.
TL;DR
Use DigitalOcean if: you need a managed Postgres / MySQL with backups, a managed app platform (build → deploy → autoscale), or a large catalog of "click and deploy" 1-click apps. Their docs are also unbeatable for beginners.
Use RareCloud if: you want raw VPS price/performance well below DO's tiers, EU presence in The Hague / Frankfurt / Bucharest, invoices from a company registered in Romania, in EUR or USD, crypto as a payment option, or your tooling is AI-heavy: our official MCP server lets Claude, Cursor or any MCP client manage your whole account under scoped tokens, with tools that order, resize or delete waiting for an explicit confirm.
Pricing, same spec, side by side
RareCloud figures are our classic KVM VPS plans (Core, Plus, Pro, Elite); DigitalOcean figures are Basic Droplets. Checked on 8 October 2026. Always verify on the live pricing pages before committing.
Core Plus Pro Elite
1 vCPU / 2 GB 2 vCPU / 4 GB 4 vCPU / 8 GB 4 vCPU / 16 GB
───────────── ───────────── ───────────── ──────────────
RareCloud €5.50/mo €9.50/mo €19.50/mo €34.50/mo
(annual) €3.75/mo €7.92/mo €16.25/mo €28.75/mo
DigitalOcean $12/mo $24/mo $48/mo $84/mo*
(annual save) no annual disc. no annual disc. no annual disc. no annual disc.
* Basic Premium AMD; DigitalOcean has no Basic Regular plan with 4 vCPU / 16 GB.
DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing page lists no annual discount; their list price is the price. Month to month, our price is about half of theirs at today's exchange rate, and annual plans bring it lower still: Core drops from €5.50 to €3.75 a month.
Traffic: these Droplets include 2 to 4 TB of transfer (up to 8 TB on the AMD plan); our four plans include 3, 5, 7 and 10 TB. Disks differ too: DigitalOcean gives more SSD on most of these sizes (50 to 200 GB against our 40 to 150 GB). Both are KVM virtual machines.
Locations
DigitalOcean: datacenters across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. NYC, SF, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney, and others.
RareCloud: 12 locations across Americas, Europe, and Asia. Silicon Valley, Phoenix, Dallas, New York, London, The Hague, Frankfurt, Bucharest, Timișoara, Constanța, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Six European cities, US East and West, and Asia via Hong Kong and Tokyo. Bucharest is our cloud region; classic VPS is sold in the other 11.
If your users are in São Paulo, Sydney, or Bangalore, DigitalOcean has presence we don't. For most European or US-East workloads our coverage is adequate.
Billing model
DigitalOcean: per-second since 1 January 2026 (60-second minimum), capped at the monthly list price.
RareCloud: dual model. Classic VPS plans are prepaid: billed monthly/quarterly/annually in advance. Cloud plans (Cloud VM from €3.99/month, Kubernetes workers, volumes, load balancers) are billed hourly and invoiced monthly; servers, Kubernetes nodes and volumes never cost more than their monthly price, the same cap philosophy as DO. Credit you hold pays the invoice automatically, and new accounts prepay the first month of what they create until the account has made two payments and is at least 38 days old. Pick the model that matches your usage: prepay annual for always-on infra, hourly for ephemeral.
API and developer experience
Both have a public REST API with token auth.
DigitalOcean is mature, doctl CLI is great, the pulumi/digitalocean and DigitalOcean Terraform provider are well-maintained, the SDKs cover Python / Go / Ruby / Node out of the box.
RareCloud is younger. Our CLI and Terraform provider are young (version 0.3); our OpenAPI spec is public, so you can generate a client in any language. Our API surface is much smaller than DO's, which makes it quicker to learn end to end. Both providers now offer scoped, expiring API tokens and an MCP server. Ours adds a rate limit you set per token, and an MCP server that covers the whole account (servers, Kubernetes, DNS, billing reads) with confirm-gated tools for anything that spends money, deletes or interrupts something. There's also an account activity log in the dashboard and API.
If "I want to write a script that provisions infrastructure" is your primary lens, both work. If "I want every operation available as a turn-key SDK in my language" is critical, DO is currently ahead.
Managed products
Where DigitalOcean genuinely outshines us today:
- Managed Databases (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka) with automated backups, point-in-time restore, replication. We don't have an equivalent yet.
- App Platform, git push to deploy, autoscale, log aggregation. We don't have an equivalent.
- Spaces (S3-compatible object storage). We have S3-compatible Object Storage too: €10/month including 1 TB.
- Functions (serverless). We don't have an equivalent.
If your architecture leans on these managed building blocks, DigitalOcean reduces operational work substantially. If you prefer to run your own Postgres in Docker on a VPS, both providers are equivalent.
Where each one wins
DigitalOcean wins for:
- Beginner-friendly documentation (the Community Tutorials library is unparalleled)
- Mature managed-product catalog
- App Platform if you want to outsource ops
- Locations outside our footprint (South America, Australia, India)
RareCloud wins for:
- Raw price-per-spec on KVM VPS (often half the cost), plus hourly cloud from €3.99/month
- EU-heavy presence (Romania, Netherlands, Germany, UK) and invoices from an EU company, in EUR or USD
- Annual pricing. DO doesn't offer it; we do, deeply discounted
- Crypto payments alongside card, PayPal and bank transfer
- MCP server with confirm-gated writes, and API tokens with scopes, expiry and per-token rate limits
- Support tickets answered by engineers, 24/7, at no extra cost
If you're cost-sensitive and infrastructure-comfortable, RareCloud fits: hourly billing means you pay only for the hours a workload runs. If you need the managed-services ecosystem and are budget-flexible, DigitalOcean is the proven choice.