DigitalOcean vs. MongoDB Atlas vs. Azure SQL Database

DigitalOcean is perfect for hosting client websites, running marketing tools, and managing media storage with Spaces and CDN. The use of Droplets to quickly launch landing pages or WordPress sites for campaigns is a Godsend. It’s great for fast, cheap, and scalable solutions. But for complex microservices or projects needing strict compliance (like HIPAA), DigitalOcean may not always be the best fit, but that depends heavily on your project.

Incentivized

It is good if you: 1. Have unstructured data that you need to save (since it is NoSQL DB) 2. You don't have time or knowledge to setup the MongoDB Atlas, the managed service is the way to go (Atlas) 3. If you need a multi regional DB across the world

Incentivized

We have found it's a great alternative for making older legacy applications work with online databases instead of only on-premises databases. We've converted over a dozen applications this way, and it has allowed our clients to have a distributed workforce using their applications without incurring the expense of a complete application rewrite.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Generous free and trial plan for evaluation or test purposes.
• New versions of MongoDB are able to be deployed with Atlas as soon as they're released—deploying recent versions to other services can be difficult or risky.
• As the key supporters of the open source MongoDB project, the service runs in a highly optimized and performant manner, making it much easier than having to do the work internally.

Incentivized

• Maintenance is always an issue, so using a cloud solution saves a lot of trouble.
• On premise solutions always suffer from fragmented implementations here and there, where several "dba's" keep track of security and maintenance. With a cloud database it's much easier to keep a central overview.
• Security options in SQL database are next level... data masking, hiding sensitive data where always neglected on premise, whereas you'll get this automatically in the cloud.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• For someone new, it could be challenging using MongoDB Atlas. Some official video tutorials could help a lot
• Pricing calculation is sometimes misleading and unpredictable, maybe better variables could be used to provide better insights about the cost
• Since it is a managed service, we have limited control over the instances and some issues we faced we couldn't;'t know about without reaching out to the support and got fixed from their end. So more control over the instance might help
• The way of managing users and access is somehow confusing. Maybe it could be placed somewhere easy to access

Incentivized

• One needs to be aware that some T-SQL features are simply not available.
• The programmatic access to server, trace flags, hardware from within Azure SQL Database is taken away (for a good reason).
• No SQL Agent so your jobs need to be orchestrated differently.
• The maximum concurrent logins maybe an unexpected problem.
• Sudden disconnects.
• The developers and admin must study the capacity and tier usage limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits otherwise some errors or even transaction aborts never seen before can occur.
• Only one Latin Collation choice.
• There is no way to debug T-SQL ( a big drawback in my point of view).

Incentivized

I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!

Incentivized

This is best solution as a DBA one could expect from a service provider and as a cloud service, it removes all your hassles.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I would give it 8. Good stuff: 1. Easy to use in terms of creating cluster, integrating with Databases, setting up backups and high availability instance, using the monitors they provide to check cluster status, managing users at company level, configure multiple replicas and cross region databases. Things hard to use: 1. roles and permissions at DB level. 2. Calculate expected costs

Incentivized

The interfaces are intuitive once you are familiar with all the functions. The ability to use different tools to interact with the platform, such as directly via a browser or code editors such as VS Code or Visual Studio is a great option and allows for integrating withn the project and other testing and developing tools.

Incentivized

Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.

Incentivized

Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We love MongoDB support and have great relationship with them. When we decided to go with MongoDB Atlas, they sent a team of 5 to our company to discuss the process of setting up a Mongo cluster and walked us through. when we have questions, we create a ticket and they will respond very quickly

Incentivized

We give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.

Incentivized

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. Amazon has a complex UI and is on the expensive side. DigitalOcean is simple to use and is easily manageable and the servers can easily be set up without additional cost and such.

Incentivized

MongoDB is a great product but on premise deployments can be slow. So we turned to Atlas. We also looked at Redis Labs and we use Redis as our side cache for app servers. But we love using MongoDB Atlas for cloud deployments, especially for prototyping because we can get started immediately. And the cost is low and easy to justify.

Incentivized

We moved away from Oracle and NoSQL because we had been so reliant on them for the last 25 years, the pricing was too much and we were looking for a way to cut the cord. Snowflake is just too up in the air, feels like it is soon to be just another line item to add to your Azure subscription. Azure was just priced right, easy to migrate to and plenty of resources to hire to support/maintain it. Very easy to learn, too.

Incentivized

Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.

Incentivized

• Positive - Elastic computer instances make it possible to pay for only for what you need.
• Positive - Competitive pricing - some of the products that DigitalOcean offers are much cheaper than those offered by competitors.
• Negative - Having to go to other cloud computing platforms for more specific, advanced services like Computer Vision optimized services, GPU cloud compute instances, etc...

Incentivized

• Positive - Faster provisioning so we don't have development teams waiting.
• Positive - Automated backups and server management - eliminates need for dedicated DBAs.

Incentivized

• Perfect for small and medium databases, being very cost effective.
• As a Platform as a Service, there is no concern about patches, upgrades and end of life.
• Be aware of security and network capabilities. The service cannot run in the VNET as Azure Virtual Machines do.