[notlambda]

DigitalOcean is quite expensive compared to GCE AWS and Vultur, but to answer your question yes it is. I ran a website with 2M monthly active users on their 5$ VPS

[KaiserPro]

A $5 instance on DO has significantly more resources than on the equivalent cost box on EC2

https://uncrunched.com/2013/08/07/digital-ocean-v-aws-10x-pe... for an old comparison.

EC2 is, and always have been slow and expensive. its the other bits that make it compelling.

[ralmeida]

Not sure about that, as others have mentioned. At 2M monthly active users, bandwidth alone would be way more than $5 on GCE/AWS, no? How much bandwidth did you use?

[ek750]

That's a bit surprising, can you expand on the difference in price between the $5 droplet and GCE? Is it other costs not included in the monthly base?

[notlambda]

DO is more expensive with their higher end VPS. GCE is cheaper if you don't use a lot of bandwidth

[pvsukale1]

Just out of curiosity what was your technology stack ? You can't run a rails app with so many users on a $5 instance :)

[notlambda]

It was Nginx + Golang + Cloudflare + Mongo, i managed to have so little resource usage because most of the request were served from CF edge nodes.

[ralmeida]

Did the CF edge nodes serve only static resources? Or also cached API calls somehow?

[notlambda]

most of the traffic was map tiles, the golang part did a mongo query to get some data but that was a minor part of the traffic