The $5 droplet includes the equivalent of $90 worth of AWS egress, although it is accounted somewhat differently. An equivalent low usage machine on AWS in us-

The $5 droplet includes the equivalent of $90 worth of AWS egress, although it is accounted somewhat differently. An equivalent low usage machine on AWS in us-east (t3a.micro - 1GB / shared CPU) on spot instead costs around $2.16, almost 57% less. So this is where bandwidth becomes interesting, especially in combination with an external CDN. Say if you're hosting 100 low volume client sites where each client gets its own instance (sensible security choice), DO you'd be paying $284/mo. more than equivalent AWS config, or you could treat the $284 as a bandwidth allowance, leaving 3.155 TB egress in aggregate across all clients before DO/AWS are breakeven again. If some/many of those client sites consume a lot of bandwidth, the equation quickly changes, but you need to start looking at edge hit rates of an individual application before attempting to make a meaningful comparison. The last project I looked at this for included several high bandwidth sites with good edge hit rates on an external CDNs, and AWS still came in significantly cheaper