Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps users maintain application availability and allows users to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to definable conditions.N/A
DigitalOcean
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Pricing
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
The operating system, CPU, RAM, and storage may be constructed in any configuration and readily altered after the build. The most important factor is the "sense of security."Problems may arise once every several years, but there is a significant difference when discussing how …
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
On the servers with fixed resources, Microsoft IIS was installed. In terms of storage capacity, the server has a predetermined limit. It's possible to run out of money before the next billing cycle begins. A higher price tag or more resources may be necessary to ensure …
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
The main reason is our total infra is created on AWS and we tend to use the natural service by AWS rather than third party tools, which has more advantages when the auto scaling interacts with other AWS services and its way easy to configure when we compare it with counter …
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
They are complement with each other. EC2 Auto Scaling + S3 can almost satisfy the needs for most cloud based applications.
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
There are no reasonable alternatives to consider when you're building a highly available application of EC2 instances in AWS. There are alternative high availability architectures to consider, including but not limited Elastic Kubernetes Service or serverless architectures. In …
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
The Oracle Compute Instance Auto scaling features works very similar to the AWS once. However, the AWS EC2 Auto scaling feature has many more config parameters to it.
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
AWS UI's are better to use. They are cleaner. Azure UI looks crowded. AWS instance is faster than Azure. Load balancer emphases in AWS is useful.
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
1 year ago, without auto scaling, every time we think we might have a peak in demand, we launch a new server manually. So far we did not buy it but sometimes the server was not used at all or we forgot to remove from load balancer. Cost was affected a little bit but human …
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
We tried with dedicated hardware load balancers with two servers a few years ago. It was a huge investment, and involves a lot of work, mainly on the server side. Also, that was not elastic. So if we wanted to go from 2 to 3 servers, we need to buy another server. That works, …
DigitalOcean
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is cheaper and more flexible than DreamHost, but DreamHost is easier to maintain than DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean has many more server options and templates/images than DreamHost. Amazon Web Services is much more confusing to use. The DigitalOcean website is much …
Chose DigitalOcean
The target segment of DigitalOcean is application developers and small teams working in startups for easily configuring and deploying infrastructure in the cloud. We selected DigitalOcean for some of our usecases as it is cost effective and easy to integrate with compared to …
Chose DigitalOcean
Simple, and quick setup, competitive pricing as well as geographically you can choose the location of the datacenter. The setup of the machine with RAM / CPU and SDD gives all options, it is just what we always needed and find our self very well with such type of service by …
Chose DigitalOcean
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is really one of the cheapest options out there for dedicated servers. Plus, their pay-per-use pricing helps companies to grow at their own pace without having to pay for a higher performance or service they don't need initially. Their platform is well built and …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an easier and cheaper way to [set up] new machines. The UX is really good and it's easy to find what you need. Competition offer[s] a complicated way to manage machines and the cost is sometimes more than [...] double of what DigitalOcean offer[s]. However[,] …
Chose DigitalOcean
As I have said, DigitalOcean was slightly more expensive than something like HostGator, but the amount of customization and quality of service make it worth any difference. AWS was always a pain to set up and use, but DigitalOcean makes it cake.
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS Opsworks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price …
Chose DigitalOcean
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Heroku Platform and Google Compute Engine
Chose DigitalOcean
Digital Ocean is easier to start with and was a great choice for that project. On other projects, I may choose Google Cloud products because of their more complex product offerings and advanced features.
Products like Storage or Pub/Sub isn't available on Digital Ocean and the …
Chose DigitalOcean
I've tried both AWS and Azure and, while they're both great solutions, they are much more challenging to setup and maintain. The idea that my billing could spike because of something unexpected leaves me a tad uneasy. For our solutions I'd rather pay the $10/mo with …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean can be seen more like a Rackspace or a similar provider. They aren't offering more extended services such as AWS Redshift of something on a larger scale. They are great for just vanilla virtualization and maintaining uptime for those resources across a large set of …
Chose DigitalOcean
Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to …
Chose DigitalOcean
Initially we started using DigitalOcean due to their pricing point as we were in development phase. Slowly when we used it, we starting liking it a lot as it is very fast & easy to get started, compared to the other Cloud Providers we've used. Also they have blogs and …
Chose DigitalOcean
Site5's customer service and support have declined over the recent years. The last couple of tickets that I submitted in 2016 were never addressed by their help team. The only customer service agent seems to be on their Twitter account. Site5 does not allow any configuration of …
Chose DigitalOcean
Vultr is a new player in the game. They don't advertise their hardware model and for that reason, people may not trust them. I have run few benchmarks on Vultr, they performed slightly better than DigitalOcean but they aren't trustworthy. Their transparency index is very low …
Chose DigitalOcean
Compared service to service, Digitalocean comes out on top usually, for smaller better spec servers. This is what they do, and specialty shops are always the best route, with no exception here. However, if you need more than a server, or are not comfortable doing more than …
Chose DigitalOcean
Cheaper than Heroku which is prohibitively expensive for a small self-funded startup. We quickly outgrew their free tier and migrated to DigitalOcean. AWS is more feature complete however, we found its maintenance overly confusing and not as well thought out. For many use cases …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean has a much lower price point for VPS - but they are not fully managed as with other services. DigitalOcean VPSs are good for quick simple applications that we are comfortable and efficient at deploying ourselves. We do not generally recommend them for clients, as …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean isn't nearly as robust as Google Cloud. DigitalOcean provides VPSs, as does Google Cloud. However, Google Cloud offers many other products as well.

ChunkHost is very similar to DigitalOcean, but doesn't have the infrastructure that DigitalOcean has. Geographical …
Chose DigitalOcean
AWS: Too complex to set things up. Period.
Mediatemple: Great features, services and customer service. Prices are a bit high for what they offer.
Linode: Outstanding features and customer support. Difficult to start with for novice users.
Chose DigitalOcean
My cost savings were significant and I felt like I was much more in control of the hardware and processes. I also had issues with certain marketing decisions my former hosting company made, DigitalOcean was an easy choice!
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with …
Features
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
9.1
Ratings
10% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings9.60 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings9.60 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings6.60 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
[Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling] is simple to set up and pretty self-explanatory. Never had issues around scaling up or down. [Now] we won't need to guess the capacity for our apps or services. The both scaling, up and down is simply perfect, you can actually stop checking every time for resources because this tool takes care of everything
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DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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Pros
  • Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
  • Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
  • Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture
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  • Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
  • Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
  • Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
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Cons
  • Sometimes, Auto scaling takes time to spin up your instances if your traffic is so high in short span of time.
  • And, Auto scaling can be more efficient if we have only Load balancer in our architecture.
  • It has some limitations on setting up the Auto scaling infra.
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  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
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Usability
Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.
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With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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Support Rating
The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.
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They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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Alternatives Considered
The operating system, CPU, RAM, and storage may be constructed in any configuration and readily altered after the build. The most important factor is the "sense of security."Problems may arise once every several years, but there is a significant difference when discussing how to cope with hardware problems in the local age.
Read full review
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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Return on Investment
  • Has helped increase service availability, which has contributed to a positive NPS from customers, leading to businesses maintaining current customers and enrolling more customers.
  • Has enabled businesses to deploy applications quickly that contribute to improved customer service.
  • Engineers can now focus more on product development rather than infrastructure issues.
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  • DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
  • DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
  • We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
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ScreenShots