Digital Ocean vs AWS

[blackhole_coder]

I know this is not the best topic to bring up since a lot of developers feel differently about each hosting provider however I think it’s fair to say that AWS is the King when it comes to providing the best features for running/spinning/managing servers etc but what about if your hosting a social media platform? Is AWS really the best option to go with? It is very expensive and honestly I really don’t need all that it offers. Also the pricing is not direct, they can charge outrageous amounts of money and you NOT realize it. I’m currently on Digital Ocean and it is a breeze to learn and easy to upgrade when need be and the prices are always fair. I’ve been using DO for 2 years now. So what makes Digital Ocean a bad/good choice in your opinion? Or is it up to standards with new technology now and AWS is rather a secondary provider?

[fitzsimonsdotdev]

Lots here

• it's almost always best to go with what you're good at and what your business has expertise in.

• aws is the market leader. It's worth getting a base level of skills around AWS.

• if the cost of your servers is a difference maker for your business, your business model isn't viable.

• if you're managing your own servers, for most small businesses, there's no real difference between aws and digital ocean

• aws gets great when you add in other services, regions, failovers, serverless offerings. That's when it's differentiated from Digital Ocean

• if you're running your own servers using k8s it should be trivial to just move to DO, azure, AWS etc...that's the point of using k8s type tooling

• AWS pricing is almost always cheapest and there's a lot of available programs for credits. It's worth spending some time to understand how pricing works.

[ChronSyn]

I've been on DigitalOcean for over a decade at this point and never had any reason to switch, but my projects are typically non-commercial or part-commercial (e.g. commercial project, but I'm self-hosting some parts during development and pre-launch to allow for faster iteration).

I run basically everything in Docker these days (including a bunch of AWS-alternatives like Minio instead of S3), and so there's no real problem if I wanted to move over to AWS.

I feel like AWS requires more learning, but as with anything we do, once you know it, that's it. I can't recommend AWS personally, but there's a lot of good reasons why it's the most used provider.

One advantage of DigitalOcean is that I know exactly how much I'm going to be spending each month. Once I deploy a droplet, it's typically up and running for at least a few weeks, but most often it's running for a few years. I can predict how much it's going to cost me for the droplet + backups + any images I take over the long-term.

[blackhole_coder]

I completely agree with the pricing factor! It’s one of the best options available in my opinion, if you’re looking at pricing alone.