I just checked one of the node types and EC2 is about 20% more expensive, even after the price hikes. AWS may have more baked-in margin than DO.
Also, I didn’t include Transfer costs in the cross-check, so AWS may be much more expensive.
Depending on your needs, AWS is hands down one of the most expensive ways to put workloads into the cloud.
At the same time it’s a bit difficult to compare them apples-to-apples. In my experience EC2 instances aren’t designed for reliability as much as they are designed to meet exactly what AWS can put on the invoice as being the value exchanged for money. I’m not bashing their design goals, they’re just different from “traditionally VPS-first” firms.
If you’re running not-huge On Demand instances you can definitely get much better performance for your dollar on something like Linode or DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, etc. And then you can still some of the AWS services where they have much less comprehensive competition. IMHO, you can beat EC2 all day but feature-wise it’s extremely difficult to beat S3.
Seems like AWS has really only gone down in price on the pre-provisioned EC2 instances, not the on-demand. On-demand is more inline with what Digital Ocean provides.