40 ms·

Amazon Lightsail vs. DigitalOcean

75 points by phildougherty 10y ago

phlyingpenguin 10y ago
"In the performance testing section later on in this post, we'll see how those numbers hold up to stress tests." I don't see it. Did I miss the performance testing section?
- MaBu 10y ago
  There are benchmarks on on VPSbenchmarks: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... I'm not sure how reliable they are but if they are this doesn't seem good for AWS: >TLDR: Amazon Lightsail 1GB will melt down with less than 15% sustained cpu usage > >Okay then, experiment aborted. 25% sustained cpu usage is too much, all other VPS at the same price can handle that but maybe we're just over the limit, we moved traffic to another machine and let the Lightsail VM cool down for a few hours. >It should be noted that for $7, Vpsdime easily handles that traffic. >For less than $4, OVH "VPS SSD 1" can do the same.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    It will be interesting to see if Amazon changes that. I can see how it happened in the first place...basically reusing the same setup they use for a t2.micro. If they leave it as-is, I can imagine anyone using it for something non-trivial being highly disappointed.
- phildougherty 10y ago
  Whoops! Good catch. Performance comparison is coming in part 2. Sorry! Editing.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Looking forward to a performance comparison. I've heard there's a cap on the egress speed that's pretty low.
  - mynegation 10y ago
    Speaking of cacthes, one your headers says: Pricing & Billing Gaurantees should be Pricing & Billing Guarantees
    - phildougherty 10y ago
      Fixed! Thank you!
bargl 10y ago
It took me a while to figure out how to minimize the share via social media bar that pops up on the left. Which for me seems to block the first 4 letters on the left hand side at my current screen width. Just a heads up. When I move to a larger 1080p monitor there is a space on the left so it doesn't block it. Look at your page with 1600 x 900. Not sure if this is an issue for you but I thought I'd mention it.
- joekrill 10y ago
  These things drive me insane. It's ridiculous. Do these people only check their sites on huge monitors?
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    Almost nobody checks their pages at 125% or 150%. Even though with higher resolution monitors these DPI settings are becoming more widely used. When I loaded the page the first thing I did was highlight that stupid box and kill it with the developer bar. I'm at 1080p and 125% DPI. As a general rule, anything that can hover over other content on the page (from share buttons to menus and beyond) are going to annoy someone and break someone's experience. No exceptions. If it isn't happening today it will happen tomorrow.
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    Do these people only check their sites on huge monitors? Based on my experience with a portrait-oriented monitor for document editing, nobody bothers making websites work at viewport sizes other than "maximized on the designer's screen."
- phildougherty 10y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, I'll look into making that less annoying.
  - phildougherty 10y ago
    We changed the size of the social share widget to be smaller, hope it helps.
ryptophan 10y ago
AWS currently not offering Lightsail/EC2 hosting within Canada, as well. DigitalOcean has been in Toronto for a while. Certainly not an important detail to many, but it was for me. AWS has been saying they will open in Canada for quite a while... seem to keep pushing the date further and further.
icpmacdo 10y ago
I really think Amazon is about to kill DigitalOcean with LightSail. I have already spun up a few instances from LightSail and its almost a carbon copy of DO but with the power of the AWS ecosystem behind it. I think its now the prefect platform for startups with still pretty minimal costs but the ability to have my Node app on LightSail storage resources on S3 and have a managed database with RDS is a no brainer. I think people are a little too worried about the difference of a few dollars between AWS and DO now and are missing the amount of traffic you could handle for less than 100$ a month with LightSail and the ability to more easily scale later on.
- MaBu 10y ago
  According to VPSBenchmarks Lightsail isn't comparable to other VPSes: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... >TLDR: Amazon Lightsail 1GB will melt down with less than 15% sustained cpu usage And also in DO I can be sure that I won't pay more then 5$ per month. Even if I'm DDOSed. Since network is essentially unlimited (There are currently no network overcharges since metering doesn't work yet). In the future I assume that they would remove my site If I get DDOSed instead of sending me bill I can't pay. But AWS: If you get DDOSed you just pay a large bill. Which can of course get nulled if Amazon feels like it but still.
  - tombrossman 10y ago
    On AWS you get a big bill, but they continue serving your content. With DigitalOcean, I've heard multiple reports that they simply disable your VPS until the DDoS ends, making your instance unreachable. With OVH, they include DDoS protection as standard. I use all three services and I like them all, but there are some big strengths and weaknesses to be aware of among them.
- demonshalo 10y ago
  no! simply no! DigitalOceans main selling point is not only the price and speed at which you setup a node. The main selling point is their freaking awesome support and their tutorial/help pages that help a lot of people with troubles that might have. AWS, with its amazing stack size, cannot compare in those 2 departments IMO!
tyingq 10y ago
In the "Where DigitalOcean Beats Lightsail" section, you might add that the OS selection on Lightsail is extremely limited. I believe you can currently only choose Amazon Linux or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
- phildougherty 10y ago
  Great suggestion. I updated the post with that. Thanks!
- Someone1234 10y ago
  And surprisingly no Windows on either one. Which is a little odd as you can get Windows running on an EC2 instance (t1.micro) for $10.95/month. Although maybe the margins on Lightsail are too thin so Amazon doesn't want to pay Microsoft's licensing fees. And before someone whines about Windows, keep in mind Windows Server 2016 now installs headless by default and will run on 512 MB of RAM (which is what the $5 Lightsail offering has).
  - tyingq 10y ago
    You might like Vultr ... they let you install any OS via an ISO file. For Windows: https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio-drivers https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio-dr... Keeps the pricing down, since you're the one responsible for licenses.
    - Someone1234 10y ago
      A Windows Server 2016 license costs $350~700. There's absolutely no way that saves money on small instances over any reasonable duration. It would take tens of years to come even close! The way Microsoft licenses Windows Server to Azure/AWS/etc is completely different to how they license it to you or I, and the pricing is hard to compete against at the lower ends.
      - tyingq 10y ago
        YMMV. Saves me money since I already have a license. I assume many migrate to the cloud.
nickjj 10y ago
I think this article misses a really important comparison point. Does anyone know if Lightsail uses the same CPU credit system as t2 EC2 instances? Details on what CPU credits are can be found at: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html#t2-instances-cpu-credits http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan... Basically if you use too much CPU for too long, AWS will throttle your CPU usage. This is detrimental to performance in cases where you're not just idling most of the time. I've had plenty of apps on DO use 40-60% CPU 24/7 without any performance degradation or throttling. Will Lightsail do the same?
- tyingq 10y ago
  Another poster has referenced this: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... It seems to confirm your suspicion. I'm not clear on whether Amazon implemented it this way on purpose, or if it was just the quickest path to launch a product, and they'll fix it later.
  - nickjj 10y ago
    Thanks for the link. So basically Lightsail isn't even in the same galaxy as DO unless they drop this constraint. Edit: I feel like they did this on purpose. It's tough to imagine an oversight as large as this slipped through by accident. It's also something developers will figure out in a matter of minutes while running on their platform. Hopefully they only have it constrained now to make sure their system doesn't tumble over and they will lift it. I guess they avoided to mention it because this pitch doesn't sound too attractive on stage: "Introducing Lightsail, a VPS competitor platform where you can get a 1 CPU core machine for $5/month, but understand that if you use more than a few percent of the machine's CPU for any extended period of time it will result in your CPU being automatically throttled to the point where your application will likely become unresponsive, and to add insult to injury we're not really making you aware of this during sign up. On second thought, just forget about it, continue using what you're using now because this isn't suited for production in most typical web applications that developers produce -- it's odd though because that's the market we're trying to cater towards.".
ilaksh 10y ago
The IO performance, CPU throttling, and price per resource lag make Lightsail a joke compared to DO. But at least Lightsail comes with a cape. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital-ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digita...
jaequery 10y ago
I've been a DO customer for years but all it would take to sell me on Lightsail at this point is if Lightsail performance beats DO. but from what i'm seeing, it seems like that's not the case?
- coolsunglasses 10y ago
  It's not close. (I use both at work and have used both for a long time)
chrisper 10y ago
When I looked at lightsail the last time, it only allowed me creating anything in Virginia. DO allows you to create droplets all over the world.
KevinationDev 10y ago
A great comparison between DigitalOcean and LightSail. I was looking for this. One small correction, AWS doesn't have any more the largest footprint when it comes to regions and revenue. Microsoft Azure now has more regions and DCs than AWS and Google combined. And for the revenue they reached 15B dollar mark by last quarter, making it the the largest and the most profitable cloud provider ever. Who would thought that is possible two years ago!
rospaya 10y ago
I won't use Lightsale precisely because it exists. While AWS is a great collection of services, it is needlesly complicated to use and at times very frustrating. Using it at work is fine since the span of services is so wide I can forgive the awful user experience, but if I have to vote with my feelings, I choose the service I use in private, when I pick what I like. In this case DigitalOcean.
eruditely 10y ago
I completely disagree that digital ocean has a loyal customer base, their customer support has been degrading across time and minor annoyances such as wp servers keep failing and you have to reset your instance, just minor stuff like that has been adding over the years and I've been wondering if a company will show up so I can move my stuff over there. This looks like it will be it. They just got so annoying it was unbearable.
rogerdpack 10y ago
wish they'd matched linode. Oh wait they have poor performance, never mind...though actually the bandwidth might be useful cost-wise still, relative to "normal" AWS bandwidth costs at least, until you reach the max, then apparently it's $0.09/GB, whereas DO is $0.02 per GB for overage (and I think they don't actually charge for it yet even LOL). digitalocean is being attacked on all sides, interesting. Hard to believe that giant AWS is trying to imitate one of its upstart competitors...
- k_sze 10y ago
  Who has poor performance? Lightsail, DO, or Linode?
  - rogerdpack 10y ago
    lightsail
redwood 10y ago
DO must be unsustainably burning cash. Acquisition by a larger player keen on developer mindshare seems inevitable

75 points by phildougherty 10y ago

"In the performance testing section later on in this post, we'll see how those numbers hold up to stress tests." I don't see it. Did I miss the performance testing section?

MaBu 10y ago
There are benchmarks on on VPSbenchmarks: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... I'm not sure how reliable they are but if they are this doesn't seem good for AWS: >TLDR: Amazon Lightsail 1GB will melt down with less than 15% sustained cpu usage > >Okay then, experiment aborted. 25% sustained cpu usage is too much, all other VPS at the same price can handle that but maybe we're just over the limit, we moved traffic to another machine and let the Lightsail VM cool down for a few hours. >It should be noted that for $7, Vpsdime easily handles that traffic. >For less than $4, OVH "VPS SSD 1" can do the same.
- tyingq 10y ago
  It will be interesting to see if Amazon changes that. I can see how it happened in the first place...basically reusing the same setup they use for a t2.micro. If they leave it as-is, I can imagine anyone using it for something non-trivial being highly disappointed.
phildougherty 10y ago
Whoops! Good catch. Performance comparison is coming in part 2. Sorry! Editing.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Looking forward to a performance comparison. I've heard there's a cap on the egress speed that's pretty low.
- mynegation 10y ago
  Speaking of cacthes, one your headers says: Pricing & Billing Gaurantees should be Pricing & Billing Guarantees
  - phildougherty 10y ago
    Fixed! Thank you!

bargl 10y ago

It took me a while to figure out how to minimize the share via social media bar that pops up on the left. Which for me seems to block the first 4 letters on the left hand side at my current screen width. Just a heads up. When I move to a larger 1080p monitor there is a space on the left so it doesn't block it. Look at your page with 1600 x 900. Not sure if this is an issue for you but I thought I'd mention it.

joekrill 10y ago
These things drive me insane. It's ridiculous. Do these people only check their sites on huge monitors?
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Almost nobody checks their pages at 125% or 150%. Even though with higher resolution monitors these DPI settings are becoming more widely used. When I loaded the page the first thing I did was highlight that stupid box and kill it with the developer bar. I'm at 1080p and 125% DPI. As a general rule, anything that can hover over other content on the page (from share buttons to menus and beyond) are going to annoy someone and break someone's experience. No exceptions. If it isn't happening today it will happen tomorrow.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  Do these people only check their sites on huge monitors? Based on my experience with a portrait-oriented monitor for document editing, nobody bothers making websites work at viewport sizes other than "maximized on the designer's screen."
phildougherty 10y ago
Thanks for the heads up, I'll look into making that less annoying.
- phildougherty 10y ago
  We changed the size of the social share widget to be smaller, hope it helps.

ryptophan 10y ago

AWS currently not offering Lightsail/EC2 hosting within Canada, as well. DigitalOcean has been in Toronto for a while. Certainly not an important detail to many, but it was for me. AWS has been saying they will open in Canada for quite a while... seem to keep pushing the date further and further.

icpmacdo 10y ago

I really think Amazon is about to kill DigitalOcean with LightSail. I have already spun up a few instances from LightSail and its almost a carbon copy of DO but with the power of the AWS ecosystem behind it. I think its now the prefect platform for startups with still pretty minimal costs but the ability to have my Node app on LightSail storage resources on S3 and have a managed database with RDS is a no brainer. I think people are a little too worried about the difference of a few dollars between AWS and DO now and are missing the amount of traffic you could handle for less than 100$ a month with LightSail and the ability to more easily scale later on.

MaBu 10y ago
According to VPSBenchmarks Lightsail isn't comparable to other VPSes: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... >TLDR: Amazon Lightsail 1GB will melt down with less than 15% sustained cpu usage And also in DO I can be sure that I won't pay more then 5$ per month. Even if I'm DDOSed. Since network is essentially unlimited (There are currently no network overcharges since metering doesn't work yet). In the future I assume that they would remove my site If I get DDOSed instead of sending me bill I can't pay. But AWS: If you get DDOSed you just pay a large bill. Which can of course get nulled if Amazon feels like it but still.
- tombrossman 10y ago
  On AWS you get a big bill, but they continue serving your content. With DigitalOcean, I've heard multiple reports that they simply disable your VPS until the DDoS ends, making your instance unreachable. With OVH, they include DDoS protection as standard. I use all three services and I like them all, but there are some big strengths and weaknesses to be aware of among them.
demonshalo 10y ago
no! simply no! DigitalOceans main selling point is not only the price and speed at which you setup a node. The main selling point is their freaking awesome support and their tutorial/help pages that help a lot of people with troubles that might have. AWS, with its amazing stack size, cannot compare in those 2 departments IMO!

tyingq 10y ago

In the "Where DigitalOcean Beats Lightsail" section, you might add that the OS selection on Lightsail is extremely limited. I believe you can currently only choose Amazon Linux or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

phildougherty 10y ago
Great suggestion. I updated the post with that. Thanks!
Someone1234 10y ago
And surprisingly no Windows on either one. Which is a little odd as you can get Windows running on an EC2 instance (t1.micro) for $10.95/month. Although maybe the margins on Lightsail are too thin so Amazon doesn't want to pay Microsoft's licensing fees. And before someone whines about Windows, keep in mind Windows Server 2016 now installs headless by default and will run on 512 MB of RAM (which is what the $5 Lightsail offering has).
- tyingq 10y ago
  You might like Vultr ... they let you install any OS via an ISO file. For Windows: https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio-drivers https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio-dr... Keeps the pricing down, since you're the one responsible for licenses.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    A Windows Server 2016 license costs $350~700. There's absolutely no way that saves money on small instances over any reasonable duration. It would take tens of years to come even close! The way Microsoft licenses Windows Server to Azure/AWS/etc is completely different to how they license it to you or I, and the pricing is hard to compete against at the lower ends.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      YMMV. Saves me money since I already have a license. I assume many migrate to the cloud.

nickjj 10y ago

I think this article misses a really important comparison point. Does anyone know if Lightsail uses the same CPU credit system as t2 EC2 instances? Details on what CPU credits are can be found at: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html#t2-instances-cpu-credits http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan... Basically if you use too much CPU for too long, AWS will throttle your CPU usage. This is detrimental to performance in cases where you're not just idling most of the time. I've had plenty of apps on DO use 40-60% CPU 24/7 without any performance degradation or throttling. Will Lightsail do the same?

tyingq 10y ago
Another poster has referenced this: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n... It seems to confirm your suspicion. I'm not clear on whether Amazon implemented it this way on purpose, or if it was just the quickest path to launch a product, and they'll fix it later.
- nickjj 10y ago
  Thanks for the link. So basically Lightsail isn't even in the same galaxy as DO unless they drop this constraint. Edit: I feel like they did this on purpose. It's tough to imagine an oversight as large as this slipped through by accident. It's also something developers will figure out in a matter of minutes while running on their platform. Hopefully they only have it constrained now to make sure their system doesn't tumble over and they will lift it. I guess they avoided to mention it because this pitch doesn't sound too attractive on stage: "Introducing Lightsail, a VPS competitor platform where you can get a 1 CPU core machine for $5/month, but understand that if you use more than a few percent of the machine's CPU for any extended period of time it will result in your CPU being automatically throttled to the point where your application will likely become unresponsive, and to add insult to injury we're not really making you aware of this during sign up. On second thought, just forget about it, continue using what you're using now because this isn't suited for production in most typical web applications that developers produce -- it's odd though because that's the market we're trying to cater towards.".

ilaksh 10y ago

The IO performance, CPU throttling, and price per resource lag make Lightsail a joke compared to DO. But at least Lightsail comes with a cape. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital-ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digita...

jaequery 10y ago

I've been a DO customer for years but all it would take to sell me on Lightsail at this point is if Lightsail performance beats DO. but from what i'm seeing, it seems like that's not the case?

coolsunglasses 10y ago
It's not close. (I use both at work and have used both for a long time)

chrisper 10y ago

When I looked at lightsail the last time, it only allowed me creating anything in Virginia. DO allows you to create droplets all over the world.

KevinationDev 10y ago

A great comparison between DigitalOcean and LightSail. I was looking for this. One small correction, AWS doesn't have any more the largest footprint when it comes to regions and revenue. Microsoft Azure now has more regions and DCs than AWS and Google combined. And for the revenue they reached 15B dollar mark by last quarter, making it the the largest and the most profitable cloud provider ever. Who would thought that is possible two years ago!

rospaya 10y ago

I won't use Lightsale precisely because it exists. While AWS is a great collection of services, it is needlesly complicated to use and at times very frustrating. Using it at work is fine since the span of services is so wide I can forgive the awful user experience, but if I have to vote with my feelings, I choose the service I use in private, when I pick what I like. In this case DigitalOcean.

eruditely 10y ago

I completely disagree that digital ocean has a loyal customer base, their customer support has been degrading across time and minor annoyances such as wp servers keep failing and you have to reset your instance, just minor stuff like that has been adding over the years and I've been wondering if a company will show up so I can move my stuff over there. This looks like it will be it. They just got so annoying it was unbearable.

rogerdpack 10y ago

wish they'd matched linode. Oh wait they have poor performance, never mind...though actually the bandwidth might be useful cost-wise still, relative to "normal" AWS bandwidth costs at least, until you reach the max, then apparently it's $0.09/GB, whereas DO is $0.02 per GB for overage (and I think they don't actually charge for it yet even LOL). digitalocean is being attacked on all sides, interesting. Hard to believe that giant AWS is trying to imitate one of its upstart competitors...

k_sze 10y ago
Who has poor performance? Lightsail, DO, or Linode?
- rogerdpack 10y ago
  lightsail

redwood 10y ago

DO must be unsustainably burning cash. Acquisition by a larger player keen on developer mindshare seems inevitable