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  1. Stackups
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  4. Cloud Hosting
  5. DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine

DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Stacks12.4K
Followers9.2K
Votes423

DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?

  1. Scalability and Flexibility: DigitalOcean offers a wide range of scalable cloud computing resources and allows users to quickly scale their infrastructure up or down as per their requirements. On the other hand, Google Compute Engine provides even more scalability and flexibility by allowing users to customize their virtual machine instances with different CPU, memory, and disk configurations, providing more control over their resources.

  2. Pricing Model: DigitalOcean follows a simple and straightforward pricing model where users pay fixed monthly rates for their chosen droplet plans. Whereas, Google Compute Engine follows a more complex pricing model that includes factors like instance usage, storage, networking, and region-specific pricing, making it a bit more intricate to estimate costs accurately.

  3. Service Offerings: DigitalOcean primarily focuses on providing a user-friendly and developer-centric platform with a limited set of services including Droplets (virtual machines), block storage, databases, and load balancers. However, Google Compute Engine offers a broader range of services including virtual machines, managed Kubernetes clusters, AI and machine learning services, GPU instances, and global load balancing, making it a more comprehensive and feature-rich platform.

  4. Global Infrastructure: Google Compute Engine has a larger global presence with data centers spread across multiple regions, providing users the ability to deploy their resources in geographically distributed locations. In contrast, DigitalOcean has a smaller number of data centers located in select regions, which may limit the options for users who require a wider geographical coverage.

  5. Integration with Other Services: Google Compute Engine integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud services like Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, and more. This tight integration allows developers to build and operate their applications more efficiently. While DigitalOcean offers some integrations with third-party services, it does not have the same level of integration with a complete suite of cloud services as Google Compute Engine.

  6. Support and Documentation: Google Compute Engine provides enterprise-level support with options for premium support packages, extensive documentation, and a large online community. DigitalOcean also offers support services, including a knowledge base, tutorials, and a community forum, but it may not be as comprehensive as Google's support resources.

In Summary, DigitalOcean provides a user-friendly and cost-effective platform with simplified pricing, while Google Compute Engine offers more advanced scalability, a wider range of services, global infrastructure, extensive integrations, and enterprise-level support options.

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Advice on DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine

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
Dalton
Dalton

Nov 8, 2020

Decided

Chose Hetnzer over DigitalOcean and Linode because Hetzner provides much cheaper VPS with much better specs. DigitalOcean might seems like a good choice at first because of how popular it is. But in reality, if all you need is a simple VPS, you won't benefit much from the their oversubscribed datacenters which often underperform other competitors. Linode is also a good choice. They have cheaper options and performs slightly better than DigitalOcean. In the end, choosing a more affordable host helps you save money. That's important when you're running a tight ship.

65.1k views65.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

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.

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.

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.
High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.
Statistics
Stacks
18.2K
Stacks
12.4K
Followers
13.3K
Followers
9.2K
Votes
2.6K
Votes
423
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
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
Integrations
Cloud 66
Cloud 66
RightScale
RightScale
Qubole
Qubole
Scalr
Scalr
Boundary
Boundary
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Kinvey
Kinvey
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Zencoder
Zencoder

What are some alternatives to DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine?

Amazon EC2

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.

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.

Linode

Linode

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

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.

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