Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Linode

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Amazon EC2

47.8K
35.1K
+ 1
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DigitalOcean

17.7K
12.9K
+ 1
2.6K
Linode

783
619
+ 1
422

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Linode: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the realm of cloud computing, Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Linode are prominent players offering virtual private servers to cater to various business needs. Here, we outline the key differences between these popular cloud service providers.

  1. Scalability: Amazon EC2 stands out for its unparalleled scalability, allowing users to effortlessly scale resources up or down based on demand through its auto-scaling feature. In contrast, DigitalOcean and Linode provide a more manual approach to scaling, where users must resize their instance manually.

  2. Variety of Instances: Amazon EC2 offers a wide array of instance types tailored to different workloads, from general-purpose to high-performance computing instances. On the other hand, DigitalOcean and Linode have a more streamlined selection of instance types, catering to general use cases.

  3. Region Availability: Amazon EC2 boasts a vast global presence with numerous data centers spread across different regions worldwide, enabling users to deploy instances closer to their target audiences for reduced latency. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean and Linode have a more limited number of data center locations, which may impact performance for geographically diverse users.

  4. Pricing Structure: Amazon EC2 offers a complex pricing structure with numerous factors influencing costs, such as instance type, storage, and data transfer. In comparison, DigitalOcean and Linode provide more straightforward and transparent pricing models, simplifying cost estimation for users.

  5. Managed Services: Amazon EC2 offers various managed services like Amazon RDS and AWS Lambda, providing users with integrated solutions for database management and serverless computing. In contrast, DigitalOcean and Linode primarily focus on providing virtual servers, lacking the extensive range of managed services offered by Amazon.

  6. Community and Support: DigitalOcean is well-regarded for its strong community support with extensive documentation and a robust community forum. Linode also provides excellent customer support and a vibrant user community, while Amazon EC2 relies heavily on its paid support plans for comprehensive assistance.

In Summary, Amazon EC2 excels in scalability and managed services, while DigitalOcean and Linode offer simpler pricing models and a more user-friendly approach to cloud computing.

Decisions about Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Linode

Albeit restricted to only a few places worlwide compared to its peers in the cloud segment, I am yet to find another provider capable of delivering a score over 5000 (Geekbench) in a benchmark on a single CPU machine, and each machine costs $6 a month. For homelab and experienced users who don't need DBaaS or IaaC's, it's a pretty straightforward choice. A more comprehensive review of Vultr's HF machines can be found here.

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Tejas Sangoi
Founder, CEO at Thalia Technologies · | 4 upvotes · 39.9K views

Our company builds micro saas applications. Based on the application we decide whether to deploy it over one of our shared servers or on a dedicated server.

We decided to Lightsail over EC2.

  1. Lightsail is a lightweight, simplified product offering that has a dramatically simplified console. The instances run in a special VPC, but this aspect is also provisioned automatically, and invisible in the console.

  2. Lightsail supports optionally peering this hidden VPC with your default VPC in the same AWS region, allowing Lightsail instances to access services like EC2 and RDS in the default VPC within the same AWS account.

  3. Bandwidth is unlimited, but of course free bandwidth is not -- however, Lightsail instances do include a significant monthly bandwidth allowance before any bandwidth-related charges apply.

  4. It has predictable pricing with no surprises at the end.

  5. The flexibility of EC2 leads inevitably to complexity. Whereas for Lighsail there is virtually no learning curve, here. You don't even technically need to know how to use SSH with a private key -- the Lightsail console even has a built-in SSH client -- but there is no requirement that you use it. You can access these instances normally, with a standard SSH client.

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Chose Hetnzer over DigitalOcean and Linode because Hetzner provides much cheaper VPS with much better specs. DigitalOcean might seems like a good choice at first because of how popular it is. But in reality, if all you need is a simple VPS, you won't benefit much from the their oversubscribed datacenters which often underperform other competitors. Linode is also a good choice. They have cheaper options and performs slightly better than DigitalOcean. In the end, choosing a more affordable host helps you save money. That's important when you're running a tight ship.

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Peter Schmalfeldt
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 60.4K views

While Media Temple is more expensive than DigitalOcean, sometimes it is like comparing apples and oranges. DigitalOcean provides what is called Virtual Private Servers ( VPS ). While you seem to be on your own dedicated server, you are, in fact, sharing the same hardware with others.

If you need to be on your own dedicated server, or have other hardware requirements, you do not really have as many options with DigitalOcean. But with Media Temple, the skies the limit ( but so is potentially the cost ).

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Jerome/Zen Quah
Shared insights
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Amazon EC2Amazon EC2DigitalOceanDigitalOcean

DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.

However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.

One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.

Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.

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Craig Finch
Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech · | 6 upvotes · 181.7K views

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 2 upvotes · 184.7K views

GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.

  • In both cases, the instance much be shut down.

There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.

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Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.

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Pros of Amazon EC2
Pros of DigitalOcean
Pros of Linode
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
  • 89
    Market leader
  • 80
    Backed by amazon
  • 79
    Reliable
  • 67
    Free tier
  • 58
    Easy management, scalability
  • 13
    Flexible
  • 10
    Easy to Start
  • 9
    Elastic
  • 9
    Web-scale
  • 9
    Widely used
  • 7
    Node.js API
  • 5
    Industry Standard
  • 4
    Lots of configuration options
  • 2
    GPU instances
  • 1
    Simpler to understand and learn
  • 1
    Extremely simple to use
  • 1
    Amazing for individuals
  • 1
    All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.
  • 560
    Great value for money
  • 364
    Simple dashboard
  • 362
    Good pricing
  • 300
    Ssds
  • 250
    Nice ui
  • 191
    Easy configuration
  • 156
    Great documentation
  • 138
    Ssh access
  • 135
    Great community
  • 24
    Ubuntu
  • 13
    Docker
  • 12
    IPv6 support
  • 10
    Private networking
  • 8
    99.99% uptime SLA
  • 7
    Simple API
  • 7
    Great tutorials
  • 6
    55 Second Provisioning
  • 5
    One Click Applications
  • 4
    Dokku
  • 4
    Node.js
  • 4
    LAMP
  • 4
    Debian
  • 4
    CoreOS
  • 3
    1Gb/sec Servers
  • 3
    Word Press
  • 3
    LEMP
  • 3
    Simple Control Panel
  • 3
    Mean
  • 3
    Ghost
  • 2
    Runs CoreOS
  • 2
    Quick and no nonsense service
  • 2
    Django
  • 2
    Good Tutorials
  • 2
    Speed
  • 2
    Ruby on Rails
  • 2
    GitLab
  • 2
    Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD s
  • 1
    CentOS
  • 1
    Spaces
  • 1
    KVM Virtualization
  • 1
    Amazing Hardware
  • 1
    Transfer Globally
  • 1
    Fedora
  • 1
    FreeBSD
  • 1
    Drupal
  • 1
    FreeBSD Amp
  • 1
    Magento
  • 1
    ownCloud
  • 1
    RedMine
  • 1
    My go to server provider
  • 1
    Ease and simplicity
  • 1
    Nice
  • 1
    Find it superfitting with my requirements (SSD, ssh.
  • 1
    Easy Setup
  • 1
    Cheap
  • 1
    Static IP
  • 1
    It's the easiest to get started for small projects
  • 1
    Automatic Backup
  • 1
    Great support
  • 1
    Quick and easy to set up
  • 1
    Servers on demand - literally
  • 1
    Reliability
  • 0
    Variety of services
  • 0
    Managed Kubernetes
  • 100
    Extremely reliable
  • 70
    Good value
  • 60
    Great customer support
  • 58
    Easy to configure
  • 37
    Great documentation
  • 24
    Servers across the world
  • 18
    Managed/hosted DNS service
  • 15
    Simple ui
  • 11
    Network and CPU usage graphs
  • 7
    IPv6 support
  • 6
    Multiple IP address support
  • 3
    Good price, good cusomter sevice
  • 3
    Ssh access
  • 2
    IP address fail over support
  • 2
    SSH root access
  • 1
    Great performance compared to EC2 or DO
  • 1
    It runs apps with speed
  • 1
    Best customizable VPS
  • 1
    Latest kernels
  • 1
    Cheapest
  • 1
    Ssds

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Cons of Amazon EC2
Cons of DigitalOcean
Cons of Linode
  • 13
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
  • 3
    No live support chat
  • 3
    Pricing
  • 2
    No "floating IP" support

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Amazon EC2?

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

What is DigitalOcean?

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

What is Linode?

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

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What companies use Amazon EC2?
What companies use DigitalOcean?
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What tools integrate with Amazon EC2?
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Blog Posts

Jan 26 2022 at 4:34AM

Pinterest

Amazon EC2RocksDBOpenTSDB+3
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Dec 22 2020 at 9:26PM

Pinterest

Amazon EC2C langMemcached+4
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Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

DigitalOcean

GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
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What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Linode?
Amazon LightSail
Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
Beanstalk
A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
It is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.
See all alternatives