Why "DigitalOcean with crypto" is normally hard
DigitalOcean is a great platform, but signing up directly means a credit card or PayPal, a billing address, and, increasingly, an identity or fraud check that flags new accounts paying anonymously. Crypto isn't a first-class payment method there, and freshly-funded accounts that try to spin up several servers quickly are exactly what their fraud systems slow down.
NoctHost sits in front of that. We hold the provider relationship; you hold a crypto balance and an email. When you deploy a DigitalOcean server through us, it's a real droplet on real DigitalOcean infrastructure. You just never touch their signup or billing.
How it works
The flow is identical to deploying on Vultr. New DigitalOcean servers are paused for now, so today these steps apply to Vultr, Hetzner and Linode:
- Top up your NoctHost balance with USDT, BTC, or any of 300+ coins.
- Hit Deploy server and choose the provider.
- Pick a region, a plan, and a Linux image, set a root password, and launch.
About sixty seconds later you have a droplet with a dedicated IPv4 and root SSH access. Billing is hourly, drawn from your balance, and stops the moment you destroy the server, same as everything else on the platform.
What's available on DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean's platform differs from Vultr's, so a few things are worth knowing up front. We'd rather be honest than have you find out after you deploy:
- Linux only. DigitalOcean doesn't offer Windows images. If you need Windows, deploy on Vultr. The Windows tier lives there.
- Regions. DigitalOcean covers a subset of our locations, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Bangalore, Sydney and Singapore. Regions that DigitalOcean doesn't run in simply won't appear when you select it.
- Same plans, same prices. Micro through Pro map onto DigitalOcean's droplet sizes at the base catalog price. You're not paying more to use it.
- Access is over SSH. DigitalOcean doesn't expose a browser console the way Vultr does, so there's no web-console button for these servers. Connect with
ssh root@your-ipusing the password you set at deploy. - Archiving works; the backup button doesn't. A DigitalOcean server that runs out of balance is still snapshotted and restored when you top up. That path is per-provider and works here. What is Vultr-only for now is the manual Create backup button: our backups table doesn't record which provider a snapshot belongs to, so we gate the button rather than hand you a restore that would look for your disk in the wrong cloud.
Vultr or DigitalOcean: which should you pick?
While new DigitalOcean servers are paused, new orders go to Vultr, Hetzner or Linode. For servers you already run, either network is fine for most workloads. Reasons you might choose one over the other:
- Redundancy. Running a second fleet on a different provider means a single provider's outage doesn't take everything down.
- Preference or peering. If your other infrastructure already lives on DigitalOcean, or their network peers better with your users, deploy there.
- Windows. Vultr-only today, so pick Vultr if you need it. The web console, which used to be on this list, now works on Hetzner too.
You can mix both under one balance. A Vultr box in one region and a DigitalOcean box in another, billed together, managed from the same dashboard and API.
Deploying today
New DigitalOcean servers are paused for now. Droplets you already run keep working and bill as before. For a new server, pick Vultr, Hetzner or Linode in the same picker. Over the API, the backend is the providerId field on POST /servers.
Same crypto, same hourly billing, same email-only account on every backend. Pick whichever provider fits the job.