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  3. Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Linode

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Linode

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.9K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
Linode
Linode
Stacks749
Followers623
Votes422
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.3K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Linode: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the realm of cloud computing, Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Linode are prominent players offering virtual private servers to cater to various business needs. Here, we outline the key differences between these popular cloud service providers.

  1. Scalability: Amazon EC2 stands out for its unparalleled scalability, allowing users to effortlessly scale resources up or down based on demand through its auto-scaling feature. In contrast, DigitalOcean and Linode provide a more manual approach to scaling, where users must resize their instance manually.

  2. Variety of Instances: Amazon EC2 offers a wide array of instance types tailored to different workloads, from general-purpose to high-performance computing instances. On the other hand, DigitalOcean and Linode have a more streamlined selection of instance types, catering to general use cases.

  3. Region Availability: Amazon EC2 boasts a vast global presence with numerous data centers spread across different regions worldwide, enabling users to deploy instances closer to their target audiences for reduced latency. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean and Linode have a more limited number of data center locations, which may impact performance for geographically diverse users.

  4. Pricing Structure: Amazon EC2 offers a complex pricing structure with numerous factors influencing costs, such as instance type, storage, and data transfer. In comparison, DigitalOcean and Linode provide more straightforward and transparent pricing models, simplifying cost estimation for users.

  5. Managed Services: Amazon EC2 offers various managed services like Amazon RDS and AWS Lambda, providing users with integrated solutions for database management and serverless computing. In contrast, DigitalOcean and Linode primarily focus on providing virtual servers, lacking the extensive range of managed services offered by Amazon.

  6. Community and Support: DigitalOcean is well-regarded for its strong community support with extensive documentation and a robust community forum. Linode also provides excellent customer support and a vibrant user community, while Amazon EC2 relies heavily on its paid support plans for comprehensive assistance.

In Summary, Amazon EC2 excels in scalability and managed services, while DigitalOcean and Linode offer simpler pricing models and a more user-friendly approach to cloud computing.

Advice on Amazon EC2, Linode, DigitalOcean

Craig
Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

200k views200k
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
Rodrigo
Rodrigo

SRE

Jul 30, 2021

Decided

Albeit restricted to only a few places worlwide compared to its peers in the cloud segment, I am yet to find another provider capable of delivering a score over 5000 (Geekbench) in a benchmark on a single CPU machine, and each machine costs $6 a month. For homelab and experienced users who don't need DBaaS or IaaC's, it's a pretty straightforward choice. A more comprehensive review of Vultr's HF machines can be found here.

70.2k views70.2k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Linode
Linode
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

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.

Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.
Deploy multiple Linux distributions;Create Configuration Profiles which associate disk images and device nodes;Boot between configuration profiles;Share disk images between configuration profiles;Resize disk images;Network and CPU usage graphs;Multiple IP address support;Managed/hosted DNS service with slave support;Custom reverse DNS (rdns);Access Out of band console access using Lish;Lish menu system to issue jobs to your Linode;Lish access via SSH keys;Support for booting into single user mode, init=/bin/bash;Support for booting with a custom "root=" kernel parameter;Support for booting with an initrd;Bootable recovery distribution (Finnix);Add and remove extra resources to and from your Linode;Shutdown Watchdog will automatically reboot your Linode in case of a crash;Clone a Linode to another;Move IPs from one Linode to another;IP address fail over support for high availability setups
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
Stacks
48.9K
Stacks
749
Stacks
18.3K
Followers
36.0K
Followers
623
Followers
13.3K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
422
Votes
2.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
Cons
  • 14
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
Pros
  • 100
    Extremely reliable
  • 70
    Good value
  • 60
    Great customer support
  • 58
    Easy to configure
  • 37
    Great documentation
Cons
  • 2
    No "floating IP" support
Pros
  • 560
    Great value for money
  • 364
    Simple dashboard
  • 362
    Good pricing
  • 300
    Ssds
  • 250
    Nice ui
Cons
  • 3
    Pricing
  • 3
    No live support chat
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Cloud 66
Cloud 66

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Linode, DigitalOcean?

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 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.

Scaleway

Scaleway

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

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

Amazon LightSail

Amazon LightSail

Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.

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