DigitalOcean vs Amazon EC2 vs Google Cloud vs Linode

Besarion Turmanauli
4 min readFeb 12, 2019

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In this article, we’re going to compare different cloud providers and their pricing.

Why choose the cloud?

Nowadays companies increasingly rely on cloud services for their server needs, allowing them to focus on their main business goals and leave infrastructure part to the providers specialized in the area.

As consumer requirements change regularly, new technologies come into play, keeping the infrastructure up to date is getting more expensive, because the type of hardware & software you needed in the start, may become obsolete more and more often and you’ll have to upgrade, modify the hardware or buy one, disposing of the hardware or hardware parts you don’t need anymore is an added cost, not to mention hiring the staff who will maintain your servers and make sure everything works seamlessly.

In addition to handling all of the above almost 100% automatically, the cloud has a better overall up-time and reliability, it’s optimized to be accessible from around the globe which is a crucial requirement for businesses providing their services internationally. Cloud providers can lower their costs by providing services to customers with different needs, reducing the amount and types of resources that aren’t used at any given time.

Operating System installation is automated and happens in seconds, installing specific software is easier than ever as most cloud providers give you OS-specific comprehensive documentation, the cloud is also a much better solution than standard hosting because of the following:

  • No upfront investment or paying in advance for the month or the year ahead
  • Pay for what you use
  • No termination fees
  • Easy scaling up/down

DigitalOcean is the editor’s choice. It’s cheapest among all the providers listed here and also offers high-performance SSD storage with 7 datacenters in 3 countries. Choose DigitalOcean if you need the cheapest option with almost unlimited bandwidth, high quality of service, and user-friendliness.

DigitalOcean starts at $5 per month and the package includes 25GB SSD + Database Storage with no limits on bandwidth.

Cost per storage space is actually 4+ times cheaper than Amazon EC2 or Google Cloud Platform.

One of the pros of DigitalOcean is massive high-quality documentation and ease of use, which has proven to be useful and easy-to-follow in practice.

BONUS: deploy your next app in seconds. Get $100 in cloud credits from DigitalOcean using this link: https://m.do.co/c/88f25eea9442

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud) offers flexible and configurable disk size and bandwidth with 8 datacenter locations in 6 countries.

This is the most expensive option starting from ~$18.26 per month which includes 2GB Bandwidth limit, 10GB Storage, and 10GB Database.

Google Cloud Platform is a powerful and reliable cloud hosting infrastructure with 4 locations on 3 different continents. GCP is focused on serving large businesses and resource-intensive websites.

You can start with ~$17 per month which includes a 2GB bandwidth limit, 10GB storage, and a 10GB database. Scaling is relatively limited to predefined configurations and isn’t as flexible as Amazon or DigitalOcean.

Linode is another great cost-effective alternative with 8 data centers across 3 regions.

As DigitaOcean, it starts from $5 per month and the package includes 1GB RAM, 25 GB SSD + Database Storage, and 1TB bandwidth limit.

As artificial intelligence is rapidly increasing its share in everything we do and it will most likely be the single most defining factor for global economic growth going forward, cloud computing platforms like ones listed above, giving computational power whenever required, an ability to scale up on the go, will likely prove crucial for developers as it’s where the new types of jobs will be created and new billion (even trillion) dollar startups emerge.

An important note about the cloud platform pricing — you’re charged on an hourly basis, so after you pay the monthly fee upfront, it’s stored as an account credit and you may end up spending it for 2 months or more, depending on how much of the purchased server resources you’re using and for how many hours.

Remember, you can always try for free by getting $100 in cloud credits from DigitalOcean when you register from this link: https://m.do.co/c/88f25eea9442

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, feel free to hit that clap button to help others find it.

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