[vacri]

DO's "most popular plan" is $10/mo [1] AWS's t2.micro in us-east is ~$10.30/mo with a standard 8GB disk [2]

Both VMs are single core, 1GB RAM. DO gives you 30GB SSD, but AWS has a freely adjustable disk size. Upscaling from 8 to 30GB is another $2 - but how many single-core low ram instances use double-digit GB?

In the middle, DO has 8 core, 16GB for $160/mo, AWS has 4 core 16GB for 185/mo + storage.

At the top end of the DO offerings, DO's 20-core 64GB machine in $640/mo, and AWS's 16-core 64GB machine is $725mo + storage (not much). The difference in pricing is not that crazy, and you get a crapload of extra free features on AWS.

Those AWS prices are with the "On-Demand pricing". If you're willing to lock-in for a year, reduce by 1/3. The argument that DO is "OMG cheaper" than AWS is no longer valid.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

[quicksilver03]

You seem to make the implicit assumption that a DO $10 VPS is equal in performance to a AWS t2.micro instance, which is not the case. For an example, check out:

http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=Host&Order=asc&Server+Typ...

DO 1GB instance at $10/month has a UnixBench of 1041 [1], to beat that with AWS you have to spend $374/month.

Also, with the t2.micro you get an EBS disk, whose I/O you have to pay in addition to the instance cost. You also have to pay for the bandwidth out of the chosen AWS region. This is not the case on DO.

AWS complicated pricing makes comparison like yours very difficult and error-prone: I would suggest to go with AWS only if you need the particular features (like ELB, SQS, VPC, etc.) that DO doesn't offer.

[1] http://serverbear.com/1989-1gb-ssd--1-cpu-digitalocean [2] http://serverbear.com/240-extra-large-amazon-web-services

[vacri]

You seem to be ignoring my two other data points. Similarly, bandwidth costs are small, unless you're really pumping out a lot of data. I don't even notice our EBS transfer costs on our bill.

And how reliable a measure is UnixBench, when the top-performing server "CC2 Large" (by a factor of 25% over second place!) is a 2-core, 8GB RAM offering? It easily beats out all the two-dozen core, high-ram offerings below it.

Hell, the names of the AWS instances in that list aren't even correct. What's a "high-cpu medium"? They mean a "c1.medium" from looking at the stats page, which is now two generations obsolete - you have to know about them and go out of your way to provision one. The one name they do list, "m3.medium", is incorrectly labelled a "high i/o" VM; AWS doesn't have a "high i/o" VM, and the m3.medium is not considered by them to be network-, ram-, or storage-optimised, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. And if you do need disk i/o with AWS, you can provision reserved i/o (not very expensive), which needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. It's just getting my goat at the moment, because my comment was trying to argue against FUD, but that reference list can't even get well-known and advertised names correct.

AWS billing is complex, absolutely, but there is also a ton of flexibility, and it makes sense once you pass the learning curve. And micros do get throttled, but they also get a certain number of "throttle credits" that help them survive bursts. And yes, I agree that you should choose the right tool for the right job - one HNer really uses that huge amount of free bandwidth you get with the small DO servers with a media streaming service (I forget the handle). But that still doesn't change the fact that AWS is no longer "OMG expensive!" over DO.

[serferfish]

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

[quicksilver03]

It takes a little more effort to find it but they have data for t2 instances, for example:

http://serverbear.com/166-micro-amazon-web-services

Do you know of any other benchmark that paints a different picture?

[serferfish]

Check out http://www.cloudharmony.com/benchmarks for something with more current data.