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?
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?