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  1. Stackups
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  5. DigitalOcean vs PythonAnywhere vs nginx

DigitalOcean vs PythonAnywhere vs nginx

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K
NGINX
NGINX
Stacks115.0K
Followers61.9K
Votes5.5K
GitHub Stars28.4K
Forks7.6K
PythonAnywhere
PythonAnywhere
Stacks90
Followers293
Votes64

DigitalOcean vs PythonAnywhere vs nginx: What are the differences?

Introduction

DigitalOcean, PythonAnywhere, and nginx are popular tools used in web hosting and development. Each has its own strengths and features that cater to different needs.

  1. Deployment Options: DigitalOcean offers cloud-based infrastructure services that allow users to deploy and manage virtual servers, while PythonAnywhere focuses on hosting Python-based web applications in the cloud. Nginx, on the other hand, is a web server known for its high performance and scalability in handling high traffic volumes.

  2. Programming Language Support: PythonAnywhere is tailored specifically for hosting Python applications, providing built-in support and tools for Python development. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, supports a wide range of programming languages and applications beyond Python. Nginx is a web server that can be used to host applications built with a variety of programming languages.

  3. Scalability and Pricing: DigitalOcean offers a scalable infrastructure that allows users to easily upgrade their resources as needed, with transparent pricing based on usage. PythonAnywhere provides a simpler pricing structure tailored for Python hosting, with options for scaling up when required. Nginx is known for its high scalability, making it suitable for handling large volumes of traffic efficiently.

  4. Server Management: DigitalOcean provides users with full control over their virtual servers, allowing for custom configurations and installations of various software packages. PythonAnywhere offers a more managed hosting solution, handling server management tasks behind the scenes for the user. Nginx, being a web server software, requires users to have some level of server management knowledge for configuration and optimization.

  5. Community and Support: DigitalOcean has a large community of users and extensive documentation to support users in setting up and managing their servers. PythonAnywhere provides dedicated support for Python-related hosting issues and offers a community forum for users to seek help and share knowledge. Nginx has a vast online community and resources for troubleshooting and optimizing server configurations.

  6. Security Features: DigitalOcean offers various security features such as firewalls, monitoring, and backups to help users protect their infrastructure and data. PythonAnywhere provides security measures specific to hosting Python applications, ensuring the platform is secure for web hosting. Nginx offers security features such as SSL/TLS encryption to protect data transmitted over the web.

In Summary, DigitalOcean, PythonAnywhere, and nginx each offer unique features and strengths tailored to different hosting and development needs, from scalability and pricing to programming language support and security features.

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Advice on DigitalOcean, NGINX, PythonAnywhere

greg00m
greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k
Comments
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.

264k views264k
Comments
Grant
Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided
  • Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
  • The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
  • The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
  • PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
429k views429k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
NGINX
NGINX
PythonAnywhere
PythonAnywhere

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.

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

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.

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
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
28.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
7.6K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
18.2K
Stacks
115.0K
Stacks
90
Followers
13.3K
Followers
61.9K
Followers
293
Votes
2.6K
Votes
5.5K
Votes
64
Pros & Cons
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
  • 1453
    High-performance http server
  • 895
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
Cons
  • 10
    Advanced features require subscription
Pros
  • 15
    Web apps
  • 11
    Easy Setup
  • 8
    Free plan
  • 8
    Great support
  • 8
    Shell access
Cons
  • 1
    Really small community
  • 1
    No root access
Integrations
Cloud 66
Cloud 66
No integrations available
Python
Python

What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, NGINX, PythonAnywhere?

Heroku

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.

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.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

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.

Microsoft Azure

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 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.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

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