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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that these services are much more cost effective than AWS.

This. DO, imo, crushes AWS's pricing, documentation and ease of use for anyone but big enterprises. I used their managed k8s for a personal project as someone who's never used k8s before and it:

* didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far

If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.

How do you figure?

$10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth.

$10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.

Their VPS pricing is competitive but pretty much everything else isn't. Specifically, I'm looking at EKS vs DO managed k8s, block storage for VPS's, and so on.

DO charges $0.10/GB per month for block storage, the same as AWS Lightsail charges for block storage. AWS also has Lightsail Containers which are far cheaper than EKS and is their DO/Linode/etc equivalent.

Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month.

DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD

AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD

I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.

Huh, you're right. I guess the main place DO beats AWS is in their managed k8s pricing, which is funnily enough one of the main thing I use. Is lightsail containers more like docker or more like k8s? It reads to me that it's more like docker.

> How do you figure?

The last time I checked Lightsail uses similar CPU credits[0] as their t2 ec2 instances.

As long as you're only using a tiny portion of your CPU it's fine but if you start doing work on your instance where your CPU is being used for a sustained amount of time then you run out of CPU credits and performance is drastically degraded.

DigitalOcean has no such mechanism. I've never had a droplet's CPU performance get penalized because I used the allocated resources that I was paying for.

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...

Yeah, your right: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/

I haven't really touched Lightsail in years, but this page shows a really nice graph that helps you understand your instance's CPU usage: https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amaz...

From what I've seen of benchmarks online, DO's droplets have better sustained (and often overall) performance than Lightsail, and this looks to be the reason why.

(Which isn't to say people should avoid Lightsail, but I don't think Lightsail is the obvious 1:1 replacement for DO that a couple of people in this thread want it to be. Lightsail intentionally restricts various things to avoid cannibalizing their normal AWS sales.)

The performance of that DO droplet will be far in excess of Lightsail.

Oh, thanks, I was not aware of Lightsail at all. It seems like this brings them much closer to being a competitive offering.

I'd argue that the billing is much more straightforward.

For example, you just pay $5 for a monthly droplet. AWS offers a near competitor to this,AWS light sail.

Digitalocean is easier to use, but only marginally. I strongly suspect many users who find AWS to be a confusing mess try DO instead. I used DO for a long time , but I've since switched to AWS

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