Ask HN: Digital Ocean vs. AWS for client hosting

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12970504

by ryanmccullagh • 10 years ago

3 8 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With Digital Ocean, there is less configuration, and I can probably fit a lot of client sites on a single box. I tried out AWS via Free Tier, while I was able to login to the box, it was a little overwhelming. Digital Ocean is much more easier to configure.

savethefuture• 10 years ago

Sounds like you answered your own question. For VPS hosting I would recommend DO.

nanis• 10 years ago

I no longer use Digital Ocean for anything after they lost an instance. While I wasn't caught unprepared, this is something I had never experienced with Linode (whom I have been using since 2007) and I was simply shocked. I think they offer the best value for money. Frequent upgrades (RAM, storage etc) are icing on the cake.

https://www.nu42.com/2015/06/linode-kvm-upgrade.html

reacharavindh• 10 years ago

Would you consider Google Cloud Platform? I recently moved my VM that ran my website and hobby projects to Google cloud and it was a better experience at the same or lower cost. f1-micro costs $4.4/month and has 0.6 G of memory Digital Ocean costs $5/month and gives 512M of memory

VM on GCP is closer to Google cloud storage which I use for backups already.

moondev• 10 years ago

Aws has more knobs to turn. T2.nano instances can be had for under $5 a month too.

jenkstom• 10 years ago

Digital Ocean is very reasonable for the price. Not quite as fast as Linode, but DO has more features. I am really liking the new volumes feature, so I can add any size file volume to an instance. Or several. It doesn't appear to be available in all locations yet, so keep that in mind when setting up a droplet.

atmosx• 10 years ago

AWS instances are more complicated to handle and at the low end I'm sure their underperform in terms of disk I/O, plus you'll need to build your own AMI or automate installation (chef, puppet, etc.) to deal with possible instance retirement.

avitzurel• 10 years ago

I use AWS for work (trip.com) and I use DO for everything personal.

I really recommend DO for what you need.

I know it sounds complicated but here's what you should do (it's really NOT complicated at all).

2 tools

1. Docker 2. Nginx

Most likely everything can be on a single instance unless you have customers with lots of traffic.

Docker to host the customer code with mounting to `/customer-name` etc... so you have a persistent storage.

If you worry about losing data, you can rsync everything to another server and hotswap when something fails.

Nginx should be the router/balancer so `client1.com` will go to the docker host it should go to.

I work this way with all of my blogs and open source projects and it's really a breeze to manage.

akbar501• 10 years ago

AWS becomes interesting when you want to automate your infrastructure (i.e. infrastructure as software). When you're not orchestrating your infrastructure, then its probably overkill.

DO, as you rightly mentioned, is a lot closer to a straight forward Linux or whatever instance (easier to use). And the prices are very attractive.

I use both and split based on the above. DO is great for hosting web apps / dynamic web sites at a reasonable price. AWS is great for orchestrated clusters / large scale production, or for very low cost static hosting via S3.

Ask HN: Digital Ocean vs. AWS for client hosting

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