Digital Ocean vs AWS: What hoster to choose?

that come into your mind are What is the best cloud provider? Where should I host? These are very important questions that need clear responses, due to the possible success that your application could have, and as well as its capacity to satisfy a big audience. This will depend, primarily, in the services range, security, stability, availability and scalability that your cloud provider could offer you.

If we give a review over the cloud services offer on market, we will find that Digital Ocean and AWS are on the top preferred. Both are good options for hosting your application, but with particular differences, which make each one of them better for different use cases. In the present blog, we will make a comparison on the benefits and use cases you can expect by selecting Digital Ocean or AWS.

What should I consider before selecting a cloud hosting provider?

There are three aspects that you should consider. The first one is the monthly budget that you are willing to invest, the second one is the level of service sophistication, and the third one is the ease of use and management.

Monthly budget for cloud services

First, you need to evaluate the real monthly costs you can afford to pay for your hosting service. If you are starting your online business then it’s better for you to keep hosting costs low and under proper control. On the other hand, if you are a well established and profitable e-business, then you can opt for a more sophisticated hosting service with higher monthly costs but wider services.

Level of service sophistication

Secondly, you need to define the level of service sophistication that you expect for your application so that you pay only for the real cloud resources (computing, database dedicated servers, general storage amount, scalability, dockerization, static content separation, etc.) your application needs to operate. For example, a simple WordPress website clearly won’t need the same cloud resources compared to a sophisticated SaaS application that will serve to thousands of users and will operate complex operations that require a major level of sophistication on cloud services.

Ease of use and management of the cloud platform

An extra item to take into consideration when selecting a cloud provider is how easy it is to manage from its own web interfaces. This item is really important in case you are not a very experienced tech-person, since it’s really probable that you will have to apply changes and configurations from the interface, and therefore it’s optimal that you have a friendly user interface that you can manipulate in an easy way.

Benefits of Digital Ocean

Great for keeping control of flat prices (cheaper)

Since Digital Ocean only offers flat monthly prices for its cloud packages, you don’t have to worry about unexpected not suitable overpricing on your monthly budget. This is a real advantage when you don’t have much time to keep a constant eye on your cloud fees and want to have the confidence that you will never pay extra costs out of the stablished budget.

Good for shared environments

Digital Ocean is a very good option for those people who provide hosting managed services for web applications or websites which are property of several separate customers. This is done in order to facilitate the maintenance and monitoring of all those web applications since all of them are located in the same server, then all fixes, updates and upgrades are applied in general.

Friendly management interface

The web management console on Digital Ocean is really friendly and simple. It doesn’t provide complex or hidden sections that are impossible to be find. It displays a clean and minimalist interface which clearly orients you to know what operations you can execute and where, as well as where to find all your hired cloud resources.

Benefits of AWS

High and easy to manage scaling capacity

AWS offers Auto Scaling, which in single words is the service that allows you to add more server capacity for your web application as demand increases over time. Let’s say that your web application has a demand peak on which users have doubled up the normal load put over your server; so, given this scenario, AWS Auto Scaling will create more servers that will allow your web application to attend all your users satisfactorily without dragging processes or lowing time response that could annoy your users and take them out of you.

AWS also offers you the possibility to have a full vision of the servers that are created with Auto Scaling when those servers are working, so that you can see the number of created servers and a vision over the resources that your web application is requiring over time.

Great for storing static content and serving from CDN

AWS offers two good services that help to optimize your website speed, these services are S3 and CloudFront. On S3 you can store the videos, images, documents, etc. that your websites use for their particular processes. And, if you add CloudFront CDN for the content stored on S3, then you will get a much better performance for your web application since CloudFront will optimize the way on which images, videos, etc. are served to your end users.

The biggest variety of services on the market

AWS offers compute services, database hosting, storage, networking, containerization, pipelines, mobile, backend, monitoring, and more types of services which make it the most robust cloud service provider you will find. It’s perfect for those who are thinking about expanding and sophisticating their web applications on big levels.

The best hosting service for you…

Digital Ocean

Little startup businesses that need to keep costs for cloud services under control.

AWS

Cloud businesses with constant increasing levels of demand with the need to scale up resources transparently.

Cloud businesses with stable traffic levels with no need to scale up dynamically.

Cloud businesses whose plans include the implementation of more sophisticated services such as IaaS, Containerization, FaaS, CI/CD, etc.

Both Digital Ocean and AWS are very good options for you to evaluate when deciding to move your web application into the cloud, the two of them have advantages and disadvantages, and you need to analyze them carefully so that you can make the best decision and get optimal results from the service you select at fair cost. So, evaluate your particular requirements, define your budget and contact us, on ClickIT we will guide you to define what’s the best cloud service to make your application boost over internet.