[George]

A good explanation from Sailed:

Don’t Use the 1-Click WordPress Installer on DigitalOcean

[Andrea]

Pretty much the one-click images from DigitalOcean and other cloud providers are “stupid” WordPress servers, usually with Apache, no server-level cache, no security or performance optimization, and just very basic and bare bones.

It’s meant for users who are new to cloud servers are scared to try it, so they provide a basic option meant to avoid conflicts that simply works (but its so-so).

[Cheryl]

Here’s a few of the specific complaints he mentioned

There are a few cons as well:

There’s no easy way to add another WordPress site to the same Droplet
The default core wp db export command yielded a warning. Attempting to then import that file using wp db import resulted in an error (access denied, need SUPER and other privileges)
The wp-fail2ban plugin is a terrible option considering it’s a freemium plugin with constant nudges to upgrade to the paid version, or buy paid addons. Other than being unnecessarily bloated and over-engineered, this plugin also seems to lack support for application passwords, which is a WordPress core feature. Here’s a good guide on how to protect WordPress with fail2ban.
There’s no page caching implementation out of the box
You’ll need to manually replace HTTP links if you opt-in for a Certbot certificate
We’d prefer the Nginx web server instead of Apache though in most cases it won’t really matter that much
It took a really long time for the database to become available, though if you opt out of using the managed service, this should not be a problem

[Ruth]

good points all around.

[Russell]

What about other clouds like Vultr, is one-click image same?

[Author]

Posts