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  5. Amazon LightSail vs DigitalOcean vs Microsoft Azure

Amazon LightSail vs DigitalOcean vs Microsoft Azure

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Stacks25.6K
Followers17.6K
Votes768
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K
Amazon LightSail
Amazon LightSail
Stacks186
Followers394
Votes9

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

# Introduction
This markdown provides a comparison between Amazon LightSail, DigitalOcean, and Microsoft Azure, highlighting key differences between these popular cloud hosting services.

1. **Pricing Model**: Amazon LightSail offers a simple and predictable pricing model with fixed monthly costs based on the server size, while DigitalOcean and Microsoft Azure follow a pay-as-you-go model where pricing is based on usage, making it more suitable for flexible and scalable projects.

2. **Scalability**: DigitalOcean and Microsoft Azure provide advanced scalability options, allowing users to easily resize their resources, add more storage, and increase processing power as needed. Amazon LightSail, on the other hand, has more limited scalability features compared to its counterparts.

3. **Variety of Services**: While all three platforms offer cloud hosting services, Microsoft Azure stands out with its wide range of services including AI and machine learning tools, IoT solutions, and data analytics capabilities that cater to enterprise-level requirements. DigitalOcean focuses more on providing straightforward cloud infrastructure services, while Amazon LightSail is designed for simplicity and ease of use.

4. **Global Data Centers**: Microsoft Azure has one of the most extensive global networks of data centers, with presence in over 140 countries, offering users greater flexibility in choosing server locations for reduced latency. DigitalOcean and Amazon LightSail have fewer data center locations in comparison, which might limit geographical options for users.

5. **Customization and Control**: DigitalOcean provides greater customization and control over server configurations and infrastructure settings, making it a preferred choice for developers looking for more hands-on management capabilities. Amazon LightSail offers a more streamlined and user-friendly interface, sacrificing some customization options for simplicity.

6. **Support and Documentation**: Microsoft Azure is known for its comprehensive documentation, extensive knowledge base, and robust technical support. DigitalOcean also provides strong community support and clear documentation. Amazon LightSail, while offering basic support, may lack the same level of depth and resources for troubleshooting complex issues.

In Summary, this comparison highlights the differences in pricing model, scalability, variety of services, global data center presence, customization, and support options between Amazon LightSail, DigitalOcean, and Microsoft Azure for cloud hosting solutions.

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Advice on Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, 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
Tejas
Tejas

Founder, CEO at Thalia Technologies

Apr 9, 2021

Decided

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.

45.5k views45.5k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Amazon LightSail
Amazon LightSail

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.

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.

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.

Use your OS, language, database, tool;Global datacenter footprint;Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA;Web Sites- Get started for free and scale up as your traffic grows. Build with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.;Infrastructure Services- Access scalable, on-demand infrastructure using Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. Take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.;Mobile Services- App development with a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure. Incorporate structured storage, user authentication and push notifications in minutes.;Cloud Services- Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and services using a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment. Support multi-tier scenarios, automated deployments and elastic scale.;Big Data- Process, analyze, and gain new insights from big data using the power of Apache Hadoop.;Media- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.
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.
-
Statistics
Stacks
25.6K
Stacks
18.2K
Stacks
186
Followers
17.6K
Followers
13.3K
Followers
394
Votes
768
Votes
2.6K
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 114
    Scales well and quite easy
  • 96
    Can use .Net or open source tools
  • 81
    Startup friendly
  • 73
    Startup plans via BizSpark
  • 62
    High performance
Cons
  • 7
    Confusing UI
  • 2
    Expensive plesk on Azure
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
  • 4
    Low cost
  • 4
    Simple Deployment
  • 1
    Simple pricing scheme
Integrations
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Bitnami
Bitnami
AWS Cloud9
AWS Cloud9
MongoLab
MongoLab
AppDynamics
AppDynamics
Cloudant
Cloudant
CopperEgg
CopperEgg
Cloud 66
Cloud 66
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, 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.

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.

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.

Gandi

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

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