Amazon Lightsail vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Lightsail
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) designed to present an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan.
$3.50
per month
DigitalOcean
Score 8.3 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 LightsailDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
512 MB Linux
$3.50
per month
1 GB Linux
$5.00
per month
2 GB Linux
$10.00
per month
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon LightsailDigitalOcean
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 LightsailDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Amazon Lightsail
Chose Amazon Lightsail
I believe Lightsail has worse support than DigitalOcean and the pay more for better service model is not great as most customers are trying it for the first time. They are both very fast to set up and get started, but we went with AWS Lightsail because we were familiar with …
Chose Amazon Lightsail
Linode and Digital Ocean are far more reliable than Amazon Lightsail. I would recommend against hosting any production applications in Lightsail. Even for prototyping, I would also suggest using the VPS provider of your choice for your production application because you can …
Chose Amazon Lightsail
Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality …
DigitalOcean

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon LightsailDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Lightsail
9.1
5 Ratings
11% above category average
DigitalOcean
8.2
31 Ratings
1% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.95 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.04 Ratings8.228 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.34 Ratings7.220 Ratings
Pre-configured templates8.95 Ratings9.325 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.85 Ratings7.730 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.95 Ratings8.729 Ratings
Operating system support9.65 Ratings7.729 Ratings
Security controls8.85 Ratings7.728 Ratings
Automation9.64 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon LightsailDigitalOcean
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon LightsailDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
9.7
(5 ratings)
8.6
(31 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon LightsailDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
We utilized Amazon Lightsail to get a web application proof of concept up and running. It's easy to set up, requires minimal configuration, and lets us to concentrate on the coding. It's designed to help you get started fast and easily, but it's not designed for corporate applications or workloads.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
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.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • static web hosting & non public managments
  • low cost remote access
  • media distribution
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
  • The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
  • DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
  • DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
  • DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • slow
  • complex integration to AWS Cloudwatch - complex setup required
  • No IPv6, a big downside
  • less value compared with Linode or Digital Ocean
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
Read full review
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality assurance tasks, and provide much more efficient and better apps with our microservices architecture.
Read full review
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 migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.
Read full review
Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Saved a lot of time on set up and configuration
  • Saved money on trial period
  • Customer service was less helpful
Read full review
DigitalOcean
  • With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt.
  • Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5.
Read full review
ScreenShots