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  5. DigitalOcean vs Heroku

DigitalOcean vs Heroku

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K

DigitalOcean vs Heroku: What are the differences?

DigitalOcean and Heroku are two popular cloud hosting platforms that offer different features and functionalities, catering to different needs and requirements of developers and businesses. Understanding the key differences between DigitalOcean and Heroku can help users make an informed decision in choosing the right platform for their specific needs.
  1. Infrastructure: DigitalOcean provides virtual machines known as "Droplets", giving users full control over their infrastructure. Users can configure and manage their own operating systems and applications. On the other hand, Heroku is a higher-level platform that abstracts away much of the infrastructure management, making it easier for developers to deploy and scale their applications without worrying about server management.

  2. Pricing Model: DigitalOcean offers a straightforward pricing model based on the resources consumed by the Droplets, such as CPU, RAM, and storage. Users are billed hourly for the resources they use. In contrast, Heroku follows a more complex pricing model that takes into account factors like dyno hours, add-ons, and database usage, which can make it harder to estimate costs accurately.

  3. Deployment Process: With DigitalOcean, users need to manually set up their own servers, configure their environments, and deploy their applications. This provides more flexibility and control but requires more technical knowledge. Heroku simplifies the deployment process by providing a Git-based workflow. Users can simply push their code changes to the Heroku remote repository, and Heroku takes care of building, deploying, and managing the application.

  4. Scalability: DigitalOcean allows users to scale their applications vertically by upgrading the resources of their Droplets or horizontally by adding more Droplets. Users have full control over the scaling process. Heroku, on the other hand, is designed to handle scaling automatically. The platform can scale the application horizontally by adding more dynos based on the workload, making it easier to handle traffic spikes without manual intervention.

  5. Integration and Add-Ons: DigitalOcean provides a wide range of pre-configured operating systems and applications that can be quickly deployed on Droplets. However, it has limited integrations and add-ons compared to Heroku. Heroku offers a marketplace of add-ons that can be easily integrated into applications, providing additional functionalities such as data services, monitoring, logging, and more.

  6. Community and Support: Both DigitalOcean and Heroku have active developer communities and provide documentation and support resources. However, DigitalOcean has a vast library of community tutorials and resources that cover a wide range of topics, making it a valuable knowledge base for developers. Heroku, being a more specialized platform, also offers extensive documentation and support, specifically tailored to its platform and features.

In summary, DigitalOcean provides more control and customization over infrastructure, follows a straightforward pricing model, requires more technical management, and offers a broader range of community resources. On the other hand, Heroku abstracts away much of the infrastructure management, simplifies the deployment process, handles scaling automatically, offers a wide range of integrations and add-ons, and provides platform-specific documentation and support.

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Advice on Heroku, DigitalOcean

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
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

Heroku
Heroku
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean

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.

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.

Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.;Run and scale any type of app.;Total visibility across your entire app.;Erosion-resistant architecture. Rich control surfaces.
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
25.8K
Stacks
18.2K
Followers
20.5K
Followers
13.3K
Votes
3.2K
Votes
2.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
Cons
  • 27
    Super expensive
  • 9
    Not a whole lot of flexibility
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 7
    Storage
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
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
Integrations
Mailgun
Mailgun
Postmark
Postmark
Loggly
Loggly
Papertrail
Papertrail
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO
Logentries
Logentries
MongoLab
MongoLab
Gemfury
Gemfury
Cloud 66
Cloud 66

What are some alternatives to Heroku, DigitalOcean?

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.

Clever Cloud

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

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 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

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

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.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

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

Scaleway

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

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

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