DigitalOcean vs SocketCluster

Overview

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.2K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

SocketCluster

Stacks47

Followers168

Votes47

GitHub Stars6.2K

Forks322

DigitalOcean vs SocketCluster: What are the differences?

What is DigitalOcean? Deploy an SSD cloud server in less than 55 seconds with a dedicated IP and root access. 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 SocketCluster? An open, scalable realtime engine for Node.js. SocketCluster is a fast, highly scalable HTTP + realtime server engine which lets you build multi-process realtime servers that make use of all CPU cores on a machine/instance. It removes the limitations of having to run your Node.js server as a single thread and makes your backend resilient by automatically recovering from worker crashes and aggregating errors into a central log.

DigitalOcean can be classified as a tool in the "Cloud Hosting" category, while SocketCluster is grouped under "Realtime Backend / API".

Some of the features offered by DigitalOcean are:

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.

On the other hand, SocketCluster provides the following key features:

Resilient on both the client and backend - Process crashes, lost connections and other failures are handled seamlessly.
Scales linearly as you add more CPU cores and workers (assuming a decent OS) - Tested with up to 16 cores.
Also designed to scale horizontally across multiple machines. See sc-redis sample.

"Great value for money" is the top reason why over 558 developers like DigitalOcean, while over 8 developers mention "Cluster mode is awesome" as the leading cause for choosing SocketCluster.

SocketCluster is an open source tool with 5.35K GitHub stars and 283 GitHub forks. Here's a link to SocketCluster's open source repository on GitHub.

DigitalOcean, Rocket.Chat, and Docplanner are some of the popular companies that use DigitalOcean, whereas SocketCluster is used by notthatbad technologies UG, Livevents, and StaffConnect. DigitalOcean has a broader approval, being mentioned in 943 company stacks & 687 developers stacks; compared to SocketCluster, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on DigitalOcean, SocketCluster

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

Peter

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 20, 2020

Decided

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 ).

67.7k views67.7k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

DigitalOcean	SocketCluster
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.	SocketCluster is a fast, highly scalable HTTP + realtime server engine which lets you build multi-process realtime servers that make use of all CPU cores on a machine/instance. It removes the limitations of having to run your Node.js server as a single thread and makes your backend resilient by automatically recovering from worker crashes and aggregating errors into a central log.
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.	Resilient on both the client and backend - Process crashes, lost connections and other failures are handled seamlessly.;Scales linearly as you add more CPU cores and workers (assuming a decent OS) - Tested with up to 16 cores.;Also designed to scale horizontally across multiple machines. See sc-redis sample.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 6.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 322
Stacks 18.2K	Stacks 47
Followers 13.3K	Followers 168
Votes 2.6K	Votes 47
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 12 Cluster mode is awesome 8 WebSockets 7 Scalability 4 Security 4 JWT based Authentication
Integrations
Cloud 66	Node.js

What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, SocketCluster?

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.

Firebase

Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.

Socket.IO

It enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed.

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 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.

PubNub

PubNub makes it easy for you to add real-time capabilities to your apps, without worrying about the infrastructure. Build apps that allow your users to engage in real-time across mobile, browser, desktop and server.

Pusher

Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

SignalR

SignalR allows bi-directional communication between server and client. Servers can now push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR supports Web Sockets, and falls back to other compatible techniques for older browsers. SignalR includes APIs for connection management (for instance, connect and disconnect events), grouping connections, and authorization.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by DigitalOcean are:

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.

On the other hand, SocketCluster provides the following key features:

Resilient on both the client and backend - Process crashes, lost connections and other failures are handled seamlessly.
Scales linearly as you add more CPU cores and workers (assuming a decent OS) - Tested with up to 16 cores.
Also designed to scale horizontally across multiple machines. See sc-redis sample.

SocketCluster is an open source tool with 5.35K GitHub stars and 283 GitHub forks. Here's a link to SocketCluster's open source repository on GitHub.

DigitalOcean vs SocketCluster