Looking for a DigitalOcean alternative?
We're the DigitalOcean alternative for teams that want a person on chat and a bill that doesn't grow with outbound traffic. Chat and tickets come with every account, our median reply is under 2 minutes, and we don't charge egress fees. One production stack with live-chat support costs $187 a month here and $287 to $767 on DigitalOcean.
Best DigitalOcean alternatives in 2026
Which one fits depends on why you're leaving. Here's who each one suits, starting with us.
American Cloud
Teams who want a fast human answer when something breaks, and no egress charges. VMs, Kubernetes, managed databases and S3-compatible storage, all in the US.
Vultr
Teams that need servers in many countries: Vultr lists 33 cloud data center regions, and it also rents bare metal.
Hetzner
Teams that want a German company and servers in Germany or Finland. Its cloud also runs in Singapore and the US.
Akamai Cloud (Linode)
Teams already on Akamai's network. Linode is now part of Akamai Cloud.
Render
Teams that would rather not run servers at all: Render deploys an app straight from a connected Git repo.
American Cloud vs DigitalOcean, side by side
List prices from each company's own pages, monthly, in US dollars. DigitalOcean prices are for its dedicated CPU droplets, the closest match to our VMs.
We took the DigitalOcean prices from its pricing pages and docs on October 14, 2026. Ours come from our pricing page.
What one production stack costs on each
Three 2 vCPU, 4 GB servers behind a load balancer, 300 GB of block storage, 1,000 GB in object storage, and support with live chat. The only line that changes is outbound traffic.
Skip the support plan and DigitalOcean's stack is $188 at 10,000 GiB, about the same as ours, but your support drops to tickets with a 24-hour reply target. Past its 12,000 GiB pool it climbs $0.01 a GiB, and ours stays at $187.
Our VMs are priced on a monthly term and rounded to the dollar; hourly billing runs about 2% higher. DigitalOcean bills in GiB, and we've counted a GB and a GiB as the same, which moves each total by less than $4.
Why teams switch from DigitalOcean
A person on chat, without a support plan
Every DigitalOcean account gets ticket support with a 24-hour reply target, and live chat starts with the $99-a-month Standard plan. Here, chat in the console and tickets come with every account. Our median reply time is under 2 minutes. Capterra reviewers rate our customer service 4.7 out of 5.
No meter on outbound traffic
DigitalOcean gives each droplet a transfer allowance, pools it across your team, and bills $0.01 per GiB after that. Spaces includes 1 TiB out, then charges the same rate. We don't charge for outbound traffic. There's no egress line on your bill, and a traffic spike, a backup restore or a big download doesn't change it. At 60,000 GiB out a month, that line is $480 on DigitalOcean and $0 here.
Your AI assistant can do the move
Connect the American Cloud MCP server to Claude Code or another assistant and it can inventory your droplets, price the matching VMs, build them, copy your data across and switch DNS. Writes stay off until you turn them on. Our DigitalOcean migration guide has the prompts to paste.
A US company, running in the US
We're a US company, and all three of our zones are in the US: us-west-0, us-west-1 and us-central-0. We own and run the OpenColo data center in Santa Clara, California. If you need your servers and your provider in the US, there's nothing to configure.
Moving from DigitalOcean
We don't import droplet images. A droplet's image is tied to DigitalOcean's hypervisor, and dragging it across is the slow, fragile way to move. The reliable way is provision and sync: build the same server here, copy the data, then switch DNS. You end up on a clean server, not a copy of an old disk.
- Droplets become VMs of the same size. Your software is set up again and your files are copied with rsync, once while the droplet keeps serving traffic and once more, briefly, at cutover.
- Volumes become block storage volumes, and the data is copied across.
- Spaces buckets copy straight to our S3-compatible object storage with rclone. Nothing gets downloaded to your machine first.
- DNS zones, firewall rules and reserved IPs are recreated, then DNS points at the new server.
- DOKS workloads are applied again to a new managed Kubernetes cluster.
- Managed databases move with pg_dump, mysqldump or a Redis RDB or AOF file into our managed PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redis.
Hundreds of teams have already moved to American Cloud from AWS or DigitalOcean.
The DigitalOcean migration guide has every step, plus prompts for your assistant. Price the new servers in the pricing calculator, or read about Cloud Compute, Kubernetes and Object Storage. Before you switch DNS, run your domain through our free DNS lookup and save its records and TTLs. Run it again after the switch to see when Cloudflare and Google return the new address.
Questions before you switch
Is American Cloud cheaper than DigitalOcean?
For a production stack with live chat support, yes. The stack priced above is $187 a month here and $287 to $767 on DigitalOcean. Live chat there takes the $99 Standard plan, and traffic past the droplets' shared allowance costs $0.01 a GiB. One server costs about the same on both: a 2 vCPU, 4 GB server with a 25 GB disk is $41.56 a month here and $42 for a DigitalOcean droplet with dedicated CPU.
How hard is it to switch from DigitalOcean?
It's mostly like-for-like: droplets, volumes, Spaces, DNS, firewalls and DOKS each have a direct match here. You rebuild each server, copy the data with two rsync passes, and switch DNS. Keep the droplet running until you're sure, so going back is one DNS change. Your AI assistant can run the steps with our MCP server.
Where does American Cloud run?
In three US zones: us-west-0, us-west-1 and us-central-0. There are no regions outside the US. Our SLA sets a 99.9% network uptime target, with service credits when we miss it. We also own and run the OpenColo data center in Santa Clara, where you can rent rack space for your own hardware.
Does American Cloud have managed databases and Kubernetes?
Yes. Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL and Redis, and managed Kubernetes where the first control node is free. You also get S3-compatible object storage, block storage, load balancers, DNS and VPCs. You can run all of it from the console, the API, the TypeScript, Go and Python SDKs, Terraform or the MCP server.
Try American Cloud
Sign up, load funds into your account, and start a VM. If you get stuck on the move, open the chat and a person will answer.