Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon RDS
Score 9.0 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 Droplets
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean Droplets
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)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon RDSDigitalOcean Droplets
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 Droplets
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean Droplets
Small Businesses
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.3 out of 10
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Block Storage
IBM Cloud Block Storage
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP IQ
SAP IQ
Score 9.4 out of 10
IBM Cloud Block Storage
IBM Cloud Block Storage
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(52 ratings)
8.9
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(24 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)DigitalOcean Droplets
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.
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DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean Droplets are the best choice for developers teams that need reliable Linux servers to deploy their projects, the ability to create a droplet for testing purposes then destroy it, and only get charged for the few hours used makes the chances of messing up very slim. DigitalOcean Droplets is a great solution because the servers are scalable and the process of adding more resources like CPU or RAM to an existing droplet takes only a few minutes and once a server is scaled up it can also be scaled down if necessary which is perfect for supporting a temporary peak in traffic for example.
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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
  • Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
  • Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
  • Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more
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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
  • In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
  • No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
  • Number of service is quite limited.
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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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean Droplets has a nonprofit program that helps nonprofit sites to run their infrastructure, which is tremendous and no competitor of DigitalOcean Droplets does that.
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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
  • Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
  • Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
  • The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible
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ScreenShots

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.