DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere

Overview

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.2K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

PythonAnywhere

Stacks90

Followers293

Votes64

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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Advice on Heroku, DigitalOcean, PythonAnywhere

Alex

Oct 20, 2020

Decided

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.

101k views101k

Comments

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

Dalton

Nov 8, 2020

Decided

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.

65.1k views65.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku	DigitalOcean	PythonAnywhere
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.	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.
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	Stacks 90
Followers 20.5K	Followers 13.3K	Followers 293
Votes 3.2K	Votes 2.6K	Votes 64
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 560 Great value for money 364 Simple dashboard 362 Good pricing 300 Ssds 250 Nice ui Cons 4 Pricing 3 No live support chat	Pros 15 Web apps 11 Easy Setup 8 Great support 8 Free plan 8 Shell access Cons 1 Really small community 1 No root access
Integrations
Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	Cloud 66	Python

What are some alternatives to Heroku, DigitalOcean, PythonAnywhere?

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.

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

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.

Related Comparisons

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

DigitalOcean vs Heroku vs PythonAnywhere

Overview