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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ).
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.
Pros of DigitalOcean
- Great value for money560
- Simple dashboard364
- Good pricing362
- Ssds300
- Nice ui250
- Easy configuration191
- Great documentation156
- Ssh access138
- Great community135
- Ubuntu24
- Docker13
- IPv6 support12
- Private networking10
- 99.99% uptime SLA8
- Simple API7
- Great tutorials7
- 55 Second Provisioning6
- One Click Applications5
- Dokku4
- LAMP4
- Debian4
- CoreOS4
- Node.js4
- 1Gb/sec Servers3
- Word Press3
- Mean3
- LEMP3
- Simple Control Panel3
- Ghost3
- Runs CoreOS2
- Quick and no nonsense service2
- Django2
- Good Tutorials2
- Speed2
- Ruby on Rails2
- GitLab2
- Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD s2
- CentOS1
- Spaces1
- KVM Virtualization1
- Amazing Hardware1
- Transfer Globally1
- Fedora1
- FreeBSD1
- Drupal1
- FreeBSD Amp1
- Magento1
- ownCloud1
- RedMine1
- My go to server provider1
- Ease and simplicity1
- Nice1
- Find it superfitting with my requirements (SSD, ssh.1
- Easy Setup1
- Cheap1
- Static IP1
- It's the easiest to get started for small projects1
- Automatic Backup1
- Great support1
- Quick and easy to set up1
- Servers on demand - literally1
- Reliability1
- Variety of services0
- Managed Kubernetes0
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects459
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup190
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups150
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting48
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment19
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Easy integration15
- Great customer support12
- GitHub integration8
- Painless & well documented6
- No-ops6
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project4
- Free4
- Great UI3
- Just works3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- MySQL extension2
- Security1
- Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot1
- Sec0
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Cons of DigitalOcean
- No live support chat3
- Pricing3
Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive27
- Not a whole lot of flexibility9
- No usable MySQL option7
- Storage7
- Low performance on free tier5
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month2