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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Cloud Hosting
  4. Cloud Hosting
  5. Amazon LightSail vs DigitalOcean vs DreamFactory

Amazon LightSail vs DigitalOcean vs DreamFactory

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K
DreamFactory
DreamFactory
Stacks39
Followers83
Votes21
GitHub Stars1.7K
Forks343
Amazon LightSail
Amazon LightSail
Stacks186
Followers394
Votes9

Amazon LightSail vs DigitalOcean vs DreamFactory: What are the differences?

Introduction

When considering cloud hosting providers, Amazon LightSail, DigitalOcean, and DreamFactory are popular choices. Each platform offers unique features and capabilities tailored to different needs.

  1. Scalability: Amazon LightSail provides easy scaling options with vertical scaling capabilities to increase server resources like CPU, memory, and storage. DigitalOcean offers both vertical and horizontal scaling, allowing users to add more instances or droplets as needed. DreamFactory, on the other hand, is more focused on providing API management services rather than scalability options for infrastructure resources.

  2. Pricing Structure: Amazon LightSail has a simple and predictable pricing structure based on fixed plans that include a set amount of resources. DigitalOcean offers a more flexible pricing model with the ability to customize resources based on individual needs, allowing for more cost-effective solutions. DreamFactory's pricing is based on the specific API management services required, offering a tailored approach depending on the use case.

  3. Operating System Support: Amazon LightSail supports a wide range of operating systems, including Linux distributions and Windows. DigitalOcean also offers various operating system options, but with a strong focus on Linux distributions. DreamFactory is built to work on top of existing infrastructure, supporting multiple operating systems but not providing direct server hosting capabilities.

  4. Integration and Ecosystem: Amazon LightSail integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, providing a comprehensive ecosystem for building and deploying applications. DigitalOcean also offers a range of integrations with third-party services and tools, enhancing flexibility and functionality. In comparison, DreamFactory focuses on API integrations and management, providing a specialized ecosystem for handling API-based applications.

  5. Documentation and Support: Both Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean offer extensive documentation, tutorials, and community support for users to troubleshoot and learn about their platforms. DreamFactory provides documentation focused on API management and integration, with additional support available through a paid support plan for enterprise users.

  6. Security Features: Amazon LightSail and DigitalOcean both offer robust security features such as firewalls, encryption, and monitoring tools to ensure data protection and compliance. DreamFactory emphasizes security within API management, providing features such as authentication, role-based access control, and encryption for securing API endpoints and data.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon LightSail, DigitalOcean, and DreamFactory lie in their scalability options, pricing structures, operating system support, integration ecosystems, documentation and support, and security features tailored to different use cases and requirements.

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Advice on DigitalOcean, DreamFactory, Amazon LightSail

Jerome/Zen
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
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.

65.1k views65.1k
Comments
Peter
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
DigitalOcean
DreamFactory
DreamFactory
Amazon LightSail
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.

DreamFactory is an open source REST API backend for mobile, web, and IoT applications. It provides RESTful web services with pre-built connectors to SQL, NoSQL, file storage systems, and web services. It's secure, reusable, and offers live API documentation.

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.
REST Any Data Source;Instant REST APIs and documentation;Simple administration;Customize your APIs;SDK interfaces for HTML5, JavaScript, and native iOS and Android;Integrates with Active Directory, LDAP, and OAuth;Enterprise-Grade Security;Designed to scale for massive deployments of transactional mobile applications and Internet of Things (IoT) devices;Single-click installers for popular IaaS, PaaS, and desktop environments
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
343
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
18.2K
Stacks
39
Stacks
186
Followers
13.3K
Followers
83
Followers
394
Votes
2.6K
Votes
21
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 560
    Great value for money
  • 364
    Simple dashboard
  • 362
    Good pricing
  • 300
    Ssds
  • 250
    Nice ui
Cons
  • 4
    Pricing
  • 3
    No live support chat
Pros
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 6
    Restful
  • 5
    SQL Rest APIS
  • 2
    Love this to easily build API's
  • 1
    Great customer support
Pros
  • 4
    Simple Deployment
  • 4
    Low cost
  • 1
    Simple pricing scheme
Integrations
Cloud 66
Cloud 66
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, DreamFactory, Amazon LightSail?

Amazon EC2

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.

Microsoft Azure

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.

Parse

Parse

With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured app in record time without ever worrying about server management. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code.

Google Compute Engine

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

Linode

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

Scaleway

Scaleway

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

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

built.io

built.io

Built.io Backend is an mBaaS that allows you to avoid designing, building, and supporting a custom backend for your mobile & web applications. Enterprises can dramatically reduce cost, lower risk and accelerate time-to-market for apps.

Appcelerator

Appcelerator

Appcelerator is the first mobile platform to combine the flexibility of open source development technologies with the power of cloud services.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

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