DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.4 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
Google Cloud Spanner
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Spanner is a cloud database-as-a-service product offered as a service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).N/A
Pricing
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
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
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
9.0
32 Ratings
10% above category average
Google Cloud Spanner
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling8.228 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.220 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.031 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images10.030 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support10.030 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls7.728 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Google Cloud Spanner
7.8
2 Ratings
11% below category average
Automatic software patching00 Ratings8.82 Ratings
Database scalability00 Ratings8.82 Ratings
Automated backups00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Database security provisions00 Ratings5.82 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings5.82 Ratings
Automatic host deployment00 Ratings7.62 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Small Businesses
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(32 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Google
Google Cloud Spanner is suited for limitless horizontal scaling while maintaining strong consistency which needs to support ACID. NoSQL databases work in scaling but no ACID support. RDBMS support ACID, but horizontal scaling is not as great. The API it provides result in some limitations to related areas of the code, such as connection pools or database linking framework. So high # of connection pools can vary.
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Pros
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
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Google
  • Super high availability
  • Scales automatically
  • High standard SLA
Read full review
Cons
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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Google
  • Support for Views
  • Support for more databases (schemas).
  • More index types that can be supported (Functional)
  • Backups (ie table/data backup) if data is deleted or truncate by accident.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Usability
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Performance
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Google
At that point, we were looking at something [that] can hold our relational database, [...] provide stable connection, and maintain high ACID transition. BigTable is for nonrelational database so it was out of our [sight] very quickly. BigQuery is a data warehouse that can hold huge amount of data but not ideal for transition. AWS RDS is [...] similar to Spanner but because most of our services are already on GCP, so we went with Spanner.
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Scalability
DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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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Google
  • Backups specifically if transactional data is deleted. Restoring made us lose time.
  • Sharding on Horizontal level was quick and easy. Deployment and increasing nodes is easy
  • Large dataset handling.
  • ACID compliance
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