Amazon Web Services vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Web Services
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.
$100
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 Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Free Tier
$0
per month
Basic Environment
$100 - $200
per month
Intermediate Environment
$250 - $600
per month
Advanced Environment
$600-$2500
per month
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAWS allows a “save when you commit” option that offers lower prices when you sign up for a 1- or 3- year term that includes an AWS service or category of services.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Amazon Web Services
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is much more mature than all of the cloud service providers out in the market. It has 300+ services that solve almost all of your cloud problems.
Chose Amazon Web Services
Initially, we were with GoDaddy hosting but made a switch to a dedicated server with Bluehost. Our reasoning was that we would get more value from a dedicated server, however, as our SAAS grew we realized cloud computing was the way to go. We ended up choosing AWS over Digital …
Chose Amazon Web Services
For a small to mid level business to maintain production level servers Heroku, Digital Ocean, and Linode are quite reasonable even though they don't provide the same level of security and GUI options as AWS (I think Heroku actually runs on AWS). Once you hit the tipping point …
Chose Amazon Web Services
The flexibility and innovation are the keys. Amazon Web Services provides all the solutions I need in one [place]. With other providers I don't have enough flexibility to create my architecture of services as I need them. Only Amazon Web Services pre-configures services ready …
DigitalOcean
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Web Services
8.9
67 Ratings
9% above category average
DigitalOcean
8.2
31 Ratings
1% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.863 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.164 Ratings8.228 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.360 Ratings7.220 Ratings
Pre-configured templates7.956 Ratings9.325 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.164 Ratings7.730 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.457 Ratings8.729 Ratings
Operating system support9.062 Ratings7.729 Ratings
Security controls9.365 Ratings7.728 Ratings
Automation9.116 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Web ServicesDigitalOcean
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 Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(79 ratings)
8.6
(31 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(10 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
7.2
(9 ratings)
8.6
(6 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(24 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Web ServicesDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
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.
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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!
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Usability
Amazon AWS
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.
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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
Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
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DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
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.
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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
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.
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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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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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.
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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • 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
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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.
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