Amazon LightSail vs Azure Websites vs DigitalOcean

Overview

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.3K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

Azure Websites

Stacks405

Followers404

Votes23

Amazon LightSail

Stacks189

Followers394

Votes9

Amazon LightSail vs Azure Websites vs DigitalOcean: What are the differences?

Pricing and Flexibility: Amazon LightSail offers a fixed pricing structure with predefined resources, while Azure Websites and DigitalOcean provide more flexibility in terms of pricing and resources allocation, allowing users to scale up or down based on their requirements.
Integration and Ecosystem: Azure Websites is deeply integrated with other Microsoft services like Azure DevOps, Azure Active Directory, and more, providing a seamless development and deployment experience. On the other hand, Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean have their integrations and ecosystems, but they may not be as comprehensive as Azure Websites.
Support and Customer Service: Azure Websites and Amazon LightSail offer robust customer support through various channels such as email, chat, and phone, with dedicated technical experts to assist customers. In contrast, DigitalOcean mainly relies on community support, although they offer a paid support option.
Scalability and Performance: Azure Websites and DigitalOcean are known for their high scalability and performance, with the ability to handle a large volume of traffic and ensure high availability. Amazon LightSail, while efficient for small to medium-sized websites, may not offer the same level of scalability and performance as Azure Websites and DigitalOcean.
Management and Control: DigitalOcean provides a simple yet powerful control panel that allows users to manage their servers and resources easily. Azure Websites offers advanced management tools for monitoring, scaling, and deployment. Amazon LightSail strikes a balance between simplicity and functionality, providing an intuitive interface for managing websites efficiently.
Additional Services and Features: Azure Websites come with a wide range of additional services such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and more, expanding the capabilities beyond traditional web hosting. Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean also offer additional services, but they may not be as diverse and extensive as those provided by Azure Websites.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon LightSail, Azure Websites, and DigitalOcean lie in pricing, integration, support, scalability, management, and additional services.

Advice on DigitalOcean, Azure Websites, Amazon LightSail

Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

264k views264k

Comments

Dalton

Nov 8, 2020

Decided

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.

65k views65k

Comments

Peter

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 20, 2020

Decided

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 ).

67.7k views67.7k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

DigitalOcean	Azure Websites	Amazon LightSail
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.	Azure Websites is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables you to build, deploy and scale enterprise-grade web Apps in seconds. Focus on your application code, and let Azure take care of the infrastructure to scale and securely run it for you.	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.
We provide all of our users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, flexible API, and the ability to select to nearest data center location.;SSD Cloud Servers in 55 Seconds;We provide a 99.99% uptime SLA around network, power and virtual server availability. If we fail to deliver, we’ll credit you based on the amount of time that service was unavailable.;All servers come with 1Gb/sec. network interface. Plans start with 1TB per month and increase incrementally.;KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is one of the fastest-growing open source full virtualization solution for Linux. Our KVM virtualized droplets are designed to address a high level of security and performance.;With our SSD hard drives, you can expect much faster disk i/o performance when compared to a traditional storage medium (e.g. SATA).;We have created a simple name spaced API that provides complete control over your virtual private servers.;All cloud servers are built on powerful Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD storage.;Shared Private Networking enables Droplets to communicate with other Droplets in that same datacenter.;Transfer a copy of your Droplet snapshot to all regions (Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York).;An intuitive user interface to control all of your virtual servers. Create, resize, rebuild and snapshot with single clicks.;Full featured DNS management allows you to easily manage your domains.;If you ever get locked out of your virtual server, you’ll be able to recover it with full console access.;Automatically set your server to be backed up. Or take a snapshot when you reach a milestone.	.NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python;Built-in AutoScale and Load Balancing;High Availability with Auto-Patching;Continuous Deployment with Git, TFS, GitHub;SQL Databases, MySQL, DocumentDB, Search, MongoDB;WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla, Drupal	-
Statistics
Stacks 18.3K	Stacks 405	Stacks 189
Followers 13.3K	Followers 404	Followers 394
Votes 2.6K	Votes 23	Votes 9
Pros & Cons
Pros 560 Great value for money 364 Simple dashboard 362 Good pricing 300 Ssds 250 Nice ui Cons 3 No live support chat 3 Pricing	Pros 17 Ease of deployment 6 Free plans for students	Pros 4 Low cost 4 Simple Deployment 1 Simple pricing scheme
Integrations
Cloud 66	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, Azure Websites, Amazon LightSail?

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

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.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

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

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Related Comparisons

Amazon LightSail vs Azure Websites vs DigitalOcean: What are the differences?

Pricing and Flexibility: Amazon LightSail offers a fixed pricing structure with predefined resources, while Azure Websites and DigitalOcean provide more flexibility in terms of pricing and resources allocation, allowing users to scale up or down based on their requirements.
Integration and Ecosystem: Azure Websites is deeply integrated with other Microsoft services like Azure DevOps, Azure Active Directory, and more, providing a seamless development and deployment experience. On the other hand, Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean have their integrations and ecosystems, but they may not be as comprehensive as Azure Websites.
Support and Customer Service: Azure Websites and Amazon LightSail offer robust customer support through various channels such as email, chat, and phone, with dedicated technical experts to assist customers. In contrast, DigitalOcean mainly relies on community support, although they offer a paid support option.
Scalability and Performance: Azure Websites and DigitalOcean are known for their high scalability and performance, with the ability to handle a large volume of traffic and ensure high availability. Amazon LightSail, while efficient for small to medium-sized websites, may not offer the same level of scalability and performance as Azure Websites and DigitalOcean.
Management and Control: DigitalOcean provides a simple yet powerful control panel that allows users to manage their servers and resources easily. Azure Websites offers advanced management tools for monitoring, scaling, and deployment. Amazon LightSail strikes a balance between simplicity and functionality, providing an intuitive interface for managing websites efficiently.
Additional Services and Features: Azure Websites come with a wide range of additional services such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and more, expanding the capabilities beyond traditional web hosting. Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean also offer additional services, but they may not be as diverse and extensive as those provided by Azure Websites.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon LightSail, Azure Websites, and DigitalOcean lie in pricing, integration, support, scalability, management, and additional services.

Amazon LightSail vs Azure Websites vs DigitalOcean

Overview

Amazon LightSail vs Azure Websites vs DigitalOcean: What are the differences?

Advice on DigitalOcean, Azure Websites, Amazon LightSail

Detailed Comparison