Amazon Web Services vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

We recommend AWS Lightsail with Plesk Ubuntu Web Admin (free) edition for launching WordPress websites. Pricing starts with 3.5$ per month and they are providing 3 months free. In order to access advanced features of Plesk, consider upgrading to paid Plesk plans that starts with 13.50$ per month (10 websites supported). Up to 40% discount is available for the first year. Anyway, even the free Plesk Web Admin version is by itself self sufficient with free SSL.

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.

Incentivized

• Starting an instance and accessing it for testing purpose, demo or production deployment its always easy.
• All the things which are available over AWS are pretty well managed and easy to use.
• You might find everything you required for an product and other development over AWS.
• Its suitable for both either an enterprise or an startup
• Various resources and documentation are available in case you struck somewhere.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• If there is one thing I think AWS needs improvement on, it is the administration dashboard. It can be a nightmare to use especially when trying to access billing. This could be made better, honestly, as there should be a simplified way to access simple admin features.
• While AWS was fairly easy to integrate into our solutions, it is not as easy to use without some IT knowledge. The dashboards are complicated and designed for someone who is computer savvy. If you are just want to keep track of billing, for example, you may need to take a course or spend a few hours with someone being walked through the admin console.
• AWS does tend to be slow at times. If you do not have a fast internet connection, it can take time to access services that are hosted on AWS. This is not always the case but we have had clients complain about this if they are trying to access a service from multiple points (IP addresses). The only real fix we found was to make our files cache to another server and only keep current data accessible to clients.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.

Our cloud platform architecture was designed in order to collect, analyze, and optimize modern networks, from AWS-powered computing, networking, storage, and more. So, we needed a reliable, scalable, and secure global computing infrastructure. Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing were key features in our evaluation and later on for scalability and high performance. We being a cybersecurity company, we needed to ensure that our cloud provider utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden the infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures - which AWS had all in place.

Incentivized

Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.

AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.

The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to
immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a
good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of
company because of its affordability and ease of use.

Incentivized

The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.

Amazon Web Services is well suited when we have a huge amount of data to store, process, manipulate and get meaningful information out of. It is also suitable when we need very fast data retrieval from the database. They provide a superior product at a fair price which allows us to further our goals and push the limits of what we are capable of as a team / company.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• AWS has lowered our employee cost, because you don't have to hire Network/Server Admins to manage infrastructure.
• Increased productivity by incorporating Continuous Integration with AWS and our development life cycle.
• Increased customer confidence by being able to provide HIPAA level security in our development and production environments

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized