Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon RDS
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.N/A
DigitalOcean
Score 8.6 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 Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
$0.24 ($0.48)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
$0.25 ($0.50)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MySQL
$0.29 ($0.58)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for Oracle
$0.482 ($0.964)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
$1.02 ($1.52)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon RDSDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Amazon RDS
Chose Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is very well integrated with AWS services like CloudWatch, Lambda, IAM, Secrets Manager, S3, etc. It is AWS managed database service. It provides a serverless version using Aurora with auto-scaling features. Its features like …
DigitalOcean

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
8.3
17 Ratings
5% below category average
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability9.017 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups9.317 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions8.316 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics7.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment6.713 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
8.1
31 Ratings
2% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.228 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings7.220 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings9.425 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings7.630 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.629 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings7.629 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings7.628 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(51 ratings)
8.5
(31 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(4 ratings)
8.6
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(24 ratings)
8.8
(18 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Whether your organization is [an] early startup or large company AWS RDS fits in most of the cases such as 1. Easy to start, setup, used by [a] few or large developers team. 2. You can easily scale DB [instances] when your business required scaling as a startup or pay only for [users] to optimize cost as [a] large organization. 3. If your application requires SQL Server, Oracle, or Maria DB then you should use AWS RDS instance. 4. Your application requires better availability and security of data you can use AWS RDS instance. When AWS RDS is not recommended: 1. You need automatic scaling or capacity flexibility as request load gradually increases, better to use Amazon Aurora DB in this case.
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.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Setting up and managing a new RDS is just a matter of few clicks.
  • Maintaining different version of backup is just like a matter of turning on and off.
  • Automatic minor update of database.
  • Best restore:- You can even restore to 1 second before time.
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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
  • You don't have os-level or hardware-level access to the system, so all your performance tuning needs to be done within your application or within the parameters of the database engine that amazon allows you to customize.
  • Customizations/Extensions to the database engines are impossible, as you don't have OS-level access.
  • Migrating in/out of RDS with zero down time can be relatively challenging from a configuration and execution perspective, depending on your infrastructure.
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
It has worked reliably in the past, we have not had any problems that would have been caused because of using RDS. Also it's future-proof, it will scale easily if user base of the application that relies on it is going to increase rapidly. Our application deployments also rely on it so renewing it is essential for business & switching to different provider would cause costs without any apparent benefit.
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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
I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).
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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.
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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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.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
[Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)] is much better to have everything in the cloud instead of having it on-premise once you can get all the benefits from Cloud. Of course, it can be a bit expensive if your company it's not growing anymore but if you check it in detail, you can see that the scalability of Cloud makes a lot of sense and also the reliability.
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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.
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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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • RDS has made sure that we don't spend a lot of time resolving issues that are not even remotely relevant to our business use-cases. It has thus made the life of DB administrators easy which allows them to explore other avenues as well.
  • Using RDS for around 10 years now, we have never had an issue BECAUSE of RDS. It is a very reliable service.
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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

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.