DigitalOcean vs AWS Comparison – Who is the Winner ?

DigitalOcean and AWS(Amazon Web Services) are cloud service platforms that offer database storage, computer power among other functionalities. DigitalOcean's goal seems to be to sell very straight-forward servers to developers, whereas AWS seems to want to offer anything anyone could possibly want, covering the entire gamut of cloud computing and cloud storage. I've used both and have found that each have their pros and cons, and in this article I will make comparisons between DigitalOcean and AWS so get you an overview of both these vendors.

Range of Services

Digital Ocean focuses sells standard VPS servers with a very flexible provisioning and billing. They currently has 8 data centers positioned in New York City, Amstedam, San Francisco, Singapore, LonDon, Frankfurt, Toronto, Bangalore India. DigitalOcean concentrates on three key selling points to stand out: Simplicity, High-Performance virtual servers and pricing. Most of their customers are the developers who want to deploy ‘Servers' and applications to test it out. DO focuses on selling cheap compute droplets, which is one of AWS’s many products.

In stark contrast to DigitalOcean is Amazon, Amazon’s AWS is the market’s leader by far, in fact it is estimated that Amazon has as much computing capacity as the next 11 competitors on the list combined. Since AWS has the ‘Everything for Everyone’ approach, it sells multiple products in multiple categories. You can choose various products ranging from storage, networking, to database and compute. They own the largest data centers in the world located strategically in 9 regions around the world.

The Pricing

You can pay a $5/mo droplet (1GB ram – 1 vCPU – 25GB storage – 1TB bandwidth) on DigitalOcean and go upto $920/mo (largest plan with 86GB ram – 46 vCPUs – 575GB storage – 10TB bandwidth).

AWS has wide range of pricing and most advanced configurations for VMs including GPU support and etc. Amazon EC2 has a large number of instance types, ranging from micro instances with less than a GB of memory to large, disk or memory optimized servers. Each of these instance types can be further enhanced with extra storage volumes with provisioned IOPs. In November 2016, AWS launched a dev-centric service called, Lightsail. Lightsail gives you a simple VPS offering, prices starting from 5$ with 512 MB Memory-1 Core Processor – 20 GB SSD Disk and 1 TB Transfer.

Overview

Both companies are at the same price for the cheapest package but DigitalOcean is offering more storage than Amazon Lightsail and twice much of RAM.

Performance Benchmarks

To known the performance of each VPS plan, we have runs some commands on the cheapest package – $5/mo – at both companies.

Memory Benchmarks

As you see, DigitalOcean offering more RAM ended up having faster speeds. If RAM is important to you, you’d get more bang for your buck with DigitalOcean.

CPU Benchmarks

Both companies performed about the same at the 9th percentile. Lightsail max requests weren’t nearly as high as DO.

File I/O Benchmarks

DigitalOcean performed a over 4x the requests per second of Lightsail. DO totally faster than Amazon on this test.

MYSQL Benchmarks

DigitalOcean had the best performance at the 95th percentile and the most reads/write requests per second but the maximum request time was nearly a second. Lightsail was second in read/writes but also had a significantly better maximum request time.

Apache Benchmarks

Amazon Lightsail win with this test, they faster on all cases.

Network Benchmarks

DigitalOcean is the winner of this test although the speed results do not make a significant difference.

Features and Usability