DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere

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DigitalOcean

17.7K
12.9K
+ 1
2.6K
Heroku

25.2K
20.1K
+ 1
3.2K
PythonAnywhere

93
290
+ 1
64

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>
  1. Pricing Model: DigitalOcean follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing users to be charged only for the resources they consume. Heroku, on the other hand, offers a free tier for small applications but can become expensive as the application scales up. PythonAnywhere provides a free tier as well, with paid plans that offer more resources and capabilities.
  2. Deployment Process: DigitalOcean provides developers with complete control over the deployment process, allowing them to configure servers and environments according to their needs. Heroku simplifies the deployment process by abstracting away server management and focusing on code deployment directly. PythonAnywhere offers a straightforward web-based deployment process that is suitable for beginners and small projects.
  3. Supported Languages: DigitalOcean offers support for a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, making it suitable for diverse projects. Heroku primarily focuses on supporting web applications developed in Ruby, Node.js, Java, Python, PHP, and Go. PythonAnywhere, as the name suggests, is specifically designed to support Python applications, making it ideal for Python developers.
  4. Scalability Options: DigitalOcean provides scalable infrastructure solutions like Droplets and Kubernetes clusters, allowing applications to scale up easily with increasing traffic. Heroku offers horizontal and vertical scaling options, making it convenient for developers to adjust resources as needed. PythonAnywhere provides basic scaling options with limited customization compared to the other platforms.
  5. Community and Support: DigitalOcean has a large community of developers and extensive documentation resources, making it easy to find solutions to common problems. Heroku offers robust support and a marketplace for add-ons to enhance application functionality. PythonAnywhere has a smaller community but provides personalized support for users, especially those new to the platform.

In Summary, DigitalOcean, Heroku, and PythonAnywhere differ in their pricing models, deployment processes, supported languages, scalability options, and community support.

Decisions about DigitalOcean, Heroku, and PythonAnywhere

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.

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I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!

Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.

Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.

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Peter Schmalfeldt
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 60.1K views

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 ).

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Jerome/Zen Quah
Shared insights
on
Amazon EC2Amazon EC2DigitalOceanDigitalOcean

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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Pros of DigitalOcean
Pros of Heroku
Pros of PythonAnywhere
  • 560
    Great value for money
  • 364
    Simple dashboard
  • 362
    Good pricing
  • 300
    Ssds
  • 250
    Nice ui
  • 191
    Easy configuration
  • 156
    Great documentation
  • 138
    Ssh access
  • 135
    Great community
  • 24
    Ubuntu
  • 13
    Docker
  • 12
    IPv6 support
  • 10
    Private networking
  • 8
    99.99% uptime SLA
  • 7
    Simple API
  • 7
    Great tutorials
  • 6
    55 Second Provisioning
  • 5
    One Click Applications
  • 4
    Dokku
  • 4
    Node.js
  • 4
    LAMP
  • 4
    Debian
  • 4
    CoreOS
  • 3
    1Gb/sec Servers
  • 3
    Word Press
  • 3
    LEMP
  • 3
    Simple Control Panel
  • 3
    Mean
  • 3
    Ghost
  • 2
    Runs CoreOS
  • 2
    Quick and no nonsense service
  • 2
    Django
  • 2
    Good Tutorials
  • 2
    Speed
  • 2
    Ruby on Rails
  • 2
    GitLab
  • 2
    Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD s
  • 1
    CentOS
  • 1
    Spaces
  • 1
    KVM Virtualization
  • 1
    Amazing Hardware
  • 1
    Transfer Globally
  • 1
    Fedora
  • 1
    FreeBSD
  • 1
    Drupal
  • 1
    FreeBSD Amp
  • 1
    Magento
  • 1
    ownCloud
  • 1
    RedMine
  • 1
    My go to server provider
  • 1
    Ease and simplicity
  • 1
    Nice
  • 1
    Find it superfitting with my requirements (SSD, ssh.
  • 1
    Easy Setup
  • 1
    Cheap
  • 1
    Static IP
  • 1
    It's the easiest to get started for small projects
  • 1
    Automatic Backup
  • 1
    Great support
  • 1
    Quick and easy to set up
  • 1
    Servers on demand - literally
  • 1
    Reliability
  • 0
    Variety of services
  • 0
    Managed Kubernetes
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 174
    Add-ons for almost everything
  • 153
    Beginner friendly
  • 150
    Better for startups
  • 133
    Low learning curve
  • 48
    Postgres hosting
  • 41
    Easy to add collaborators
  • 30
    Faster development
  • 24
    Awesome documentation
  • 19
    Simple rollback
  • 19
    Focus on product, not deployment
  • 15
    Natural companion for rails development
  • 15
    Easy integration
  • 12
    Great customer support
  • 8
    GitHub integration
  • 6
    Painless & well documented
  • 6
    No-ops
  • 4
    I love that they make it free to launch a side project
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    Great UI
  • 3
    Just works
  • 2
    PostgreSQL forking and following
  • 2
    MySQL extension
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot
  • 0
    Sec
  • 15
    Web apps
  • 11
    Easy Setup
  • 8
    Great support
  • 8
    Shell access
  • 8
    Free plan
  • 7
    Super-easy to use
  • 5
    Libraries
  • 2
    Many things like Python are pre-installed

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Cons of DigitalOcean
Cons of Heroku
Cons of PythonAnywhere
  • 3
    No live support chat
  • 3
    Pricing
  • 27
    Super expensive
  • 9
    Not a whole lot of flexibility
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 7
    Storage
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
  • 2
    24/7 support is $1,000 per month
  • 1
    No root access
  • 1
    Really small community

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What is DigitalOcean?

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.

What is Heroku?

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.

What is PythonAnywhere?

It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.

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What companies use DigitalOcean?
What companies use Heroku?
What companies use PythonAnywhere?

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What tools integrate with DigitalOcean?
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What tools integrate with PythonAnywhere?

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What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, Heroku, and PythonAnywhere?
Linode
Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.
Vultr
Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.
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.
Bitnami
Our library provides trusted virtual machines for every major development stack and open source server application, ready to run in your infrastructure.
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.
See all alternatives