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I keep hearing great things about DigitalOcean, but the critical price parameter for me is flash storage, and they don't seem to be beating AWS here. The larger

by snewman 13y ago

I keep hearing great things about DigitalOcean, but the critical price parameter for me is flash storage, and they don't seem to be beating AWS here. The larger DigitalOcean plans are $1 / GB / month for flash. An EC2 hi1.4xlarge instance has 2TB of flash. At on-demand pricing, $3.10/hr x 24 hours x 30 days == $2232/month, which is slightly more expensive. But reserved instances bring that down very quickly. A "Light Utilization" instance only costs $3884 upfront for a three-year term. Even if you amortize that over just 12 months, it works out to $1152/month, almost 2x as cost-effective as DigitalOcean. (Of course, with DigitalOcean you're getting a lot more CPU and RAM per GB of SSD, but only compared to the h1.4xlarge which is deliberately flash-heavy.) This is not to run down DigitalOcean, but if you take reserved instances into account then they don't necessarily beat EC2 pricing. Or am I missing something?

rismay 13y ago
For me, they are really good on the low end. I love the fact that they offer a $5 per month instance size. Plus, since I joined during the beta period I get unlimited bandwidth for free. This beats the $15 per month AWS instance sizes or the lowest Google option of like $30 bucks. Also, it's like 2x faster than AWS. Finally, for hacking you can easily use a $5 server to replace a service like Cloudant as your backend during testing. I've had cases where I would have been charged hundreds of dollars for API calls which a $5 DigitalOcean server handled marvelously. Or you can use it host a high performance blog: http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super-easy-wordpress-server-setup/ http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super...
- Kudos 13y ago
  I thought the unlimited bandwidth thing was only until they start measuring it?
  - ampsonic 13y ago
    Correct
  - jeffasinger 13y ago
    I think customers that signed up a long time ago get unlimited bandwidth forever so long as they don't do certain things (Tor, Bittorents, run a CDN)
toomuchtodo 13y ago
Why would I take reserved instances into account when I don't have to reserve them with Digital Ocean? They're still kicking AWS' ass on pricing. Sure, big boys are still going to go with AWS (i.e. the CIA), but for small/mid-sized shops? Digital Ocean ahoy!

by snewman 13y ago

rismay 13y ago

For me, they are really good on the low end. I love the fact that they offer a $5 per month instance size. Plus, since I joined during the beta period I get unlimited bandwidth for free. This beats the $15 per month AWS instance sizes or the lowest Google option of like $30 bucks. Also, it's like 2x faster than AWS. Finally, for hacking you can easily use a $5 server to replace a service like Cloudant as your backend during testing. I've had cases where I would have been charged hundreds of dollars for API calls which a $5 DigitalOcean server handled marvelously. Or you can use it host a high performance blog: http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super-easy-wordpress-server-setup/ http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super...

Kudos 13y ago
I thought the unlimited bandwidth thing was only until they start measuring it?
- ampsonic 13y ago
  Correct
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  I think customers that signed up a long time ago get unlimited bandwidth forever so long as they don't do certain things (Tor, Bittorents, run a CDN)

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Why would I take reserved instances into account when I don't have to reserve them with Digital Ocean? They're still kicking AWS' ass on pricing. Sure, big boys are still going to go with AWS (i.e. the CIA), but for small/mid-sized shops? Digital Ocean ahoy!