DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Linode

Overview

Linode

Stacks782

Followers623

Votes422

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.2K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Linode: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Pricing Model: DigitalOcean offers a simple and straightforward pricing model based on hourly rates, making it suitable for short-term projects. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a pay-as-you-go model but can get expensive as the project scales. Linode offers a similar pricing model to DigitalOcean but provides more flexibility with hourly and monthly payment options.
Server Customization: DigitalOcean provides users with complete control over server configurations, allowing for more customization options. Heroku, on the other hand, abstracts away server configurations, focusing on ease of use and quick deployment. Linode falls in between, offering a balance of customization options and user-friendly features.
Scalability: DigitalOcean and Linode offer more scalability options, allowing users to easily upgrade resources as their project grows. Heroku, while providing scalability features, can be limited in terms of customization and control compared to the other two platforms.
Performance: DigitalOcean and Linode generally offer better performance due to their focus on providing virtual private servers with dedicated resources. Heroku, being a Platform as a Service (PaaS), may experience performance fluctuations depending on server load and shared resources.
Community Support: DigitalOcean and Linode have active and engaged community forums, providing extensive documentation and tutorials for users. Heroku also has a supportive community but may have fewer resources compared to DigitalOcean and Linode.
Integration and Add-Ons: Heroku excels in integration with third-party services and add-ons, simplifying the process of enhancing application functionality. DigitalOcean and Linode offer integrations as well but may require more manual configuration compared to Heroku's streamlined approach.

In Summary, DigitalOcean, Heroku, and Linode each have their strengths and weaknesses in pricing, customization, scalability, performance, community support, and integration options for hosting and managing web applications.

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Advice on Linode, Heroku, DigitalOcean

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Linode	Heroku	DigitalOcean
Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.	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.
Deploy multiple Linux distributions;Create Configuration Profiles which associate disk images and device nodes;Boot between configuration profiles;Share disk images between configuration profiles;Resize disk images;Network and CPU usage graphs;Multiple IP address support;Managed/hosted DNS service with slave support;Custom reverse DNS (rdns);Access Out of band console access using Lish;Lish menu system to issue jobs to your Linode;Lish access via SSH keys;Support for booting into single user mode, init=/bin/bash;Support for booting with a custom "root=" kernel parameter;Support for booting with an initrd;Bootable recovery distribution (Finnix);Add and remove extra resources to and from your Linode;Shutdown Watchdog will automatically reboot your Linode in case of a crash;Clone a Linode to another;Move IPs from one Linode to another;IP address fail over support for high availability setups	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 782	Stacks 25.8K	Stacks 18.2K
Followers 623	Followers 20.5K	Followers 13.3K
Votes 422	Votes 3.2K	Votes 2.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros 100 Extremely reliable 70 Good value 60 Great customer support 58 Easy to configure 37 Great documentation Cons 2 No "floating IP" support	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 Storage 7 No usable MySQL option 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
No integrations available	Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	Cloud 66

What are some alternatives to Linode, Heroku, DigitalOcean?

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.

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.

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.

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Related Comparisons

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Linode: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

Pricing Model: DigitalOcean offers a simple and straightforward pricing model based on hourly rates, making it suitable for short-term projects. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a pay-as-you-go model but can get expensive as the project scales. Linode offers a similar pricing model to DigitalOcean but provides more flexibility with hourly and monthly payment options.
Server Customization: DigitalOcean provides users with complete control over server configurations, allowing for more customization options. Heroku, on the other hand, abstracts away server configurations, focusing on ease of use and quick deployment. Linode falls in between, offering a balance of customization options and user-friendly features.
Scalability: DigitalOcean and Linode offer more scalability options, allowing users to easily upgrade resources as their project grows. Heroku, while providing scalability features, can be limited in terms of customization and control compared to the other two platforms.
Performance: DigitalOcean and Linode generally offer better performance due to their focus on providing virtual private servers with dedicated resources. Heroku, being a Platform as a Service (PaaS), may experience performance fluctuations depending on server load and shared resources.
Community Support: DigitalOcean and Linode have active and engaged community forums, providing extensive documentation and tutorials for users. Heroku also has a supportive community but may have fewer resources compared to DigitalOcean and Linode.
Integration and Add-Ons: Heroku excels in integration with third-party services and add-ons, simplifying the process of enhancing application functionality. DigitalOcean and Linode offer integrations as well but may require more manual configuration compared to Heroku's streamlined approach.

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Linode

Overview