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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Microsoft Azure

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Microsoft Azure

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Stacks25.6K
Followers17.6K
Votes768
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing Model: DigitalOcean is known for its straightforward and predictable pricing structure, charging based on hourly usage with no hidden fees. On the other hand, Heroku follows a pay-as-you-go model, where pricing can vary depending on the resources consumed. Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of flexible pricing options, including pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances, catering to different business needs and budgets.

  2. Scalability: While DigitalOcean provides vertical scaling by allowing users to resize their virtual machines, Heroku excels in horizontal scalability through its dynos that can be easily scaled up or down. Microsoft Azure offers both vertical and horizontal scaling options, enabling users to seamlessly expand their infrastructure based on changing demands.

  3. Ease of Use: DigitalOcean is favored for its user-friendly interface and simple setup processes, making it ideal for developers of all skill levels. Heroku, known for its easy deployment process, is especially popular among startups and small teams. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure offers a comprehensive set of tools and services, which may require a steeper learning curve but provide robust capabilities for enterprises and large-scale applications.

  4. Available Services: DigitalOcean primarily focuses on virtual machines, storage, and networking services, catering more towards developers looking for a reliable cloud infrastructure. Heroku specializes in providing a platform as a service (PaaS) environment for deploying, managing, and scaling applications without the need to manage underlying infrastructure. Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), making it a one-stop destination for various cloud computing needs.

  5. Community Support: DigitalOcean has a vibrant and active community that provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums for users. Heroku also offers a strong community presence and support channels to assist developers in deploying and managing their applications. Microsoft Azure benefits from Microsoft's extensive resources, including documentation, online forums, and dedicated customer support, ensuring users can easily find assistance when needed.

  6. Compliance and Security: DigitalOcean prioritizes data protection and compliance by offering features like data encryption, firewalls, and compliance certifications to meet industry standards. Heroku maintains a strong focus on security, providing features such as data encryption, vulnerability management, and secure networking options. Microsoft Azure ensures compliance with various industry regulations and standards while offering robust security measures, including multi-factor authentication, threat detection, and encryption capabilities.

In Summary, the key differences between DigitalOcean, Heroku, and Microsoft Azure lie in their pricing models, scalability options, ease of use, available services, community support, and compliance and security features, catering to a wide range of users with varying needs and preferences.

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Advice on Heroku, Microsoft Azure, 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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
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.

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.

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.
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
25.8K
Stacks
25.6K
Stacks
18.2K
Followers
20.5K
Followers
17.6K
Followers
13.3K
Votes
3.2K
Votes
768
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
    Storage
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
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
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
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

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Microsoft Azure, 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.

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.

Hasura

Hasura

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

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