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If you are interested in knowing who would win when you book a fight for DigitalOcean vs Amazon AWS EC2.

Then this article might be able to give you some foresight on what the outcome will be.

Since you are interested in reading an article between these two. Then that means that you interested in hosting your blog or website in the cloud.

Which, if I may say so, is a very smart choice.

Honestly comparing these two side-by-side is like comparing a heavyweight champion and a lightweight champion.

With the lightweight champion representing the DigitalOcean Cloud Hosting and heavyweight champion representing the Amazon AWS EC2.

But hey still, like I said, they are both champions.

Let us now dive on comparing these two Cloud Hosting champions side by side.

DigitalOcean vs Amazon AWS EC2. Which should I choose?

1. Regional Availability

One of the main reasons why a web owner switch to cloud aside from the obvious speed benefits. Is because they want the ability to choose a data center close to their target audience.

The main idea behind this is since the data center is close to the target visitors. Then the website loads faster for these visitors. Which is 100% valid and it really works!

Amazon AWS EC2 specifically, looking at the regional availability table they provided, they are currently available to 20 regions compared to DigitalOcean which only has 12 regions.

Amazon AWS EC2 Regions

• Americas – Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California, Montreal, São Paulo, GovCloud (US-West), GovCloud (US-East)
• Europe – Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Paris
• Asia Pacific – Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Seoul, Mumbai, Beijing, Ningxia

The GovCloud is actually only available to government agencies as Amazon would require them to submit documents. So yeah, if you are not a government agency then technically only 18 regions is available to you.

DigitalOcean Regions

• Amsterdam, Netherlands – 2 Servers
• Bangalore, India
• Frankfurt, Germany
• London, UK
• New York, USA – 3 Servers
• San Francisco, USA – 2 Servers
• Singapore
• Toronto, Canada

2. Product Offerings

Before we discuss this let us first find out what they call their individual virtual machine installation.

The Amazon AWS EC2 calls their individual virtual machine installation as instances while DigitalOcean calls theirs droplets.

Amazon AWS EC2 offers various types of instances.

Starting from your normal Cloud Hosting specifications which only consist of CPU, Memory, Storage and Bandwidth up to large project focused instances which also requires up to 16 GPUs, 12 TiB Memory or 25Gbps Network Speed.

DigitalOcean on the other hand only offers your normal Cloud Hosting specifications which consist only of CPU, Memory, Storage and Bandwidth.

Amazon AWS EC2 Instances

• General Purpose
• Compute Optimized
• Memory Optimized
• Accelerated Computing
• Storage Optimized

DigitalOcean Droplets

• Standard Droplets
• CPU Optimized Droplets

3. Management Console

Management Console or simply Console is the Shared Hosting control panel equivalent for the Cloud Hosting.

So when I say console, it is basically the backend section of your Cloud Hosting similar to the control panel of a Shared Hosting.

In my opinion both of the consoles of Amazon AWS EC2 and Droplets are both well thought of and well designed.

The only difference is that the Amazon AWS EC2 is more cluttered whereas DigitalOcean is really neat and clean.

As for launching your instance or droplet, I find the DigitalOcean to be easier as the whole process can be done in one page. Whereas in Amazon AWS EC2 the process is step-by-step and each step requires a page reload.

Furthermore, the Amazon AWS EC2 requires a few more steps to launch your instance. Which could be a bit overwhelming but a bit of research will guide you through them.

Ultimately though, both process are extremely straightforward if you are already a seasoned web owner.

4. Pricing

Both Amazon AWS EC2 and DigitalOcean offers an on-demand type of billing.

This means that you only need to pay the hours that your virtual machine is actually running.

Now here is where the difference really standout though.

Basically DigitalOcean wins hands down on this as their lowest offering only costs $5/month with your server running 24 hours a day for the whole month.

The same setup and specifications in Amazon AWS EC2 will cost you nearly around $14/month which is almost 3 times the price of DigitalOcean.

Here is a twist though.

Amazon AWS EC2 actually offers a program called AWS Free Tier. This program actually allows you to used various Amazon AWS services free for 12 months.

And that includes the Amazon AWS EC2 service as well. This means that you could actually host your website with Amazon AWS EC2 freeof charge for 12 months!

DigitalOcean on the other hand does not have a program like this. The closest thing they could offer. In my own experience, is I was able to get a $100 credit from a coupon which I am allowed to use for 2 months.

5. Support & Documentation

I am very happy to tell you that both Amazon AWS EC2 and DigitalOcean shine in this aspect.

I myself is able to get an email, chat or call support within 10 minutes that I contacted them.

But the Amazon AWS EC2 got a bit of an advantage in this aspect as for some topics they actually provide you with chat support. Which is non-existent in DigitalOcean.

Also being a bigger company, Amazon AWS EC2 probably has more support employees than DigitalOcean.

However there are still cases when their support does not reply immediately as this could be due to a high number of tickets or it just happen to be a weekend.

As for documentations, it is very easy to find guides on how to do stuff on both consoles.

I myself use the documentations provided by DigitalOcean for how to install SSL, create new VirtualHost file, setup Firewall and more.

As for Amazon I used their documentation guide on how to create an instance, how to point existing domain to their Route 53 service and more.

Aside from their documentations. A simple search of Google will yield to a lot of results as well.

6. Who is Winning?

Actually they are both winning. Have a look at this Google Trend comparison graph.

It is true that the Amazon AWS EC2 has a higher number of interest which is not surprising as they are a bigger company. And also they got potential large enterprise customers that DigitalOcean cannot possibly accommodate.

However, DigitalOcean, even though they have a lower numbers of interest. We can clearly see that their interest numbers are very consistent similar to Amazon AWS EC2.

This graph just shows and confirms that both company are right exactly where they are supposed to be. And also shows that they are both indeed very consistent prospects for their respective target market.

It may be true that Amazon AWS EC2 targets both the small to medium companies and the large enterprises that need a reliable and scalable Cloud Hosting service. This means that they also target the DigitalOcean market.

But they failed to provide affordable pricing for small customers willing to settle down on the right Cloud Hosting immediately. And this is exactly where the DigitalOcean pricing comes into play.

It is true that the Amazon AWS EC2 offers a 12 month free usage on their Amazon AWS EC2 service. But there are actually small company customers out there who would prefer to settle down on DigitalOcean right away rather than using the Amazon AWS EC2 service for free in 12 months. Then after that go into the process of migration to something they could afford.

I myself knew this as when I ask whether my cloud customers would want to use the Amazon Free Tier or settle on the DigitalOcean already. Most did prefer to settle down on DigitalOcean right away.

However, for large enterprises that need a reliable Cloud Hosting, where money is not a factor, then only 5 Cloud Hosting service providers come into my mind. And the Amazon AWS EC2 is indeed one of them.

Conclusion

You cannot really go wrong with either the Amazon AWS EC2 or DigitalOcean. As they both provide excellent and top notch performance which is what the Cloud Hosting is well known for.

The only factors that will affect your choice are honestly the price and the regional availability.

Basically if Amazon AWS EC2 has your target region in one of their data centers then you should go with them. The same goes for DigitalOcean data centers.

Next is the price, DigitalOcean in the long run will costs you a lot less even though Amazon AWS EC2 offers a 12 month free usage.

If you are someone who is in a tight budget then the right choice for you is the DigitalOcean.

Or alternatively, go use the Amazon AWS EC2 free tier program for the next 12 months then switch to DigitalOcean after that.

The only problem is that you will need to migrate everything in 12 months. And migrating could lead to some complications and downtime.

Actually migrating contents is rather easy but the downtime caused by DNS propagation is unavoidable. So choose your migration time wisely.

If you are currently still trying to decide which hosting to choose for your website. My recommended managed hosting providers for WordPress article might interests you.

In this article, I will show you my GoDaddy in-depth review for their Shared Hosting offering.

GoDaddy has definitely grown into a giant household name in the world of web hosting providers.

They currently have 18 million customers worldwide and have 77 million domain names registered under their banner.

It is no wonder that they are currently the world’s largest domain registrar.

The thing about GoDaddy is that they have been around for a long time now. And in the web hosting market, being around in the long time, most of the time, means that the company has matured enough already — atleast hardware wise.

This means that the company by now should already have a large number of data centers. And have enough hardware ready for customer influx or system downtime.

I really think that GoDaddy has really grown into this kind of company.

Currently GoDaddy has 14 facilities worldwide including North America, Asia, Europe, India and more. A solid proof that they have grown into a very dependable company in terms of hardware availability.

GoDaddy currently offers Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

Furthermore they also allow you to buy SSL Certificates and Domains directly from their website along with some other web related services.

Here is my GoDaddy In-Depth Review – Shared Hosting Edition.

1. Pricing

To start this review off, let us have a look at GoDaddy’s pricing.

My first impression on their pricing is that it is mostly in the middle range of the current Shared Hosting pricing in the market.

I have seen some Shared Hosting prices that are more than half of their pricing and others that is 40% higher than GoDaddy’s pricing.

I honestly think that they did prefer to place their pricing comfortably in the middle. They do not want to charge too much or charge too low.

Here is the breakdown of their pricing:

Economy

• Monthly Price – $7.99/mo
• 1 Website
• 100GB Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth

Deluxe

• Monthly Price – $10.99/mo
• Unlimited Websites
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth

Ultimate

• Monthly Price – $16.99/mo
• Unlimited Websites
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• 2X Processing Power & Memory
• Free SSL Certificate
• Free Premium DNS

Maximum

• Monthly Price – $24.99/mo
• Unlimited Websites
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• 2X Processing Power & Memory
• Free SSL Certificate for the Full Term
• Free Premium DNS

One more thing I noticed is that currently GoDaddy does not offer specific discounted prices if you go annual plans. What they currently have is a 30% discount coupon for all plans.

This coupon applies to both the monthly and yearly.

You could also search for other coupon codes online and apply it easily in the checkout page.

2. Purchasing Experience

The purchase experience with GoDaddy is also very pleasant.

All you have to do is choose your Shared Hosting plan, add a domain if you need to, add a coupon if you have one, create an account with them and complete your purchase.

After that, almost immediately, you will receive multiple email from GoDaddy confirming your purchase.

Also since you are logged-in to their system already you actually have access to your hosting and domain right away. Just go to the My Account section.

The reason the purchasing experience is an important part of this review. Is because there are actually web hosting providers out there which will give you a real awful purchase experience.

One example of this is that I encountered 2 web hosting providers before that after taking my money decided to ask me to send them my IDs and made me wait hours before giving me my logins.

Thankfully, GoDaddy is not like one of these hosting providers.

3. Control Panel

Thankfully, the GoDaddy Shared Hosting uses the cPanel from this company as their control panel.

This is probably good news for most web owners as this is the most common control panel right now. This means that if you are used to this control panel then you will not be in an unfamiliar environment.

The reason I want to mention this in this review is because this could be buying factor for some web owners.

This is because there are actually web hosting providers out there that use a completely different control panel.

Being in a different control panel means that doing your usual stuff in the control panel would take more time as you will need to find your way in it first.

And not only that, so far all of the custom control panels that I have worked on either have features that are missing. Or they have the feature but it is incomplete so it is worthless nonetheless.

For me the real deal breaker here is the missing features that is a necessity for you.

For sure, I am not the only one who look into this when they are considering to purchase a hosting for a client. Some of my clients do ask specifically if they can have a hosting with a cPanel. While some when I ask would say they also want a cPanel.

4. Preparing the Website

This is now that part where I work on setting up the website hosted on the GoDaddy Shared Hosting.

We will then test this website with various speed tests web applications. And see how the GoDaddy Shared Hosting actually performs in real time.

This website uses the default Twenty Seventeen theme of WordPress and I just edited the appearance so it will look like a normal blog website.

The first thing I did is change the header of the Twenty Seventeen theme and changed it to a full-width image with 1920 x 420 pixels resolution.

I also added two posts that shows on the homepage with featured images at 780 x 480 pixels resolution.

Take note that the images I used here are all optimized already.

I changed some of the sidebar items and added categories and removed the recent comments widget.

I think I removed another default widget in the sidebar but cannot remember what it was. Anyway what I have in time of testing are Search Box, Recent Posts and Categories.

Next is the plugins cleanup. If you use the GoDaddy WordPress installer then you might find your plugins section already have some plugins pre-installed.

Since I do not actually need these plugins then I deleted them.

I then installed the plugins I need for the optimization of the website.

These are mainly the Autoptimize which will handle the JS, CSS and HTML files minification.

And the other is Cache Enabler which will handle generating cache to be served to the visitors.

That is all for now. If you are interested in further optimization you could still do CDN, Premium DNS, Lazy Loading media files and more.

For the meantime, I want to use the tools that are readily available to a starter blogger and show them the performance they could actually get right away. With just installing a couple of plugins and enabling some of its settings.

In summary here are the current optimizations in the website as of time of testing:

• Optimized Images
• Minified JS, CSS and HTML
• Cached Pages

The plugins I have are:

• Akismet
• Autoptimize
• Cache Enabler
• Really Simple SSL – Get a free SSL for GoDaddy.
• Limit Login

5. Performance

Finally we are in the most important part of this GoDaddy in-depth review.

This is the part where we will test the website we just prepared above and see how it actually performs in real time.

Here are the various tests I did and their results:

Google PageSpeed Insights – Mobile

Google PageSpeed Insights – Desktop

Pingdom Tools

GTMetrix

Bitcatcha

These scores are absolutely outstanding for a Shared Hosting. I am looking specially on the Google PageSpeed Insights scores.

This is the most important ones as if your score in this is really low then Google will punish your SEO ranking.

Also take note that these scores are from the newly updated Google PageSpeed Insights platform as well.

Since they updated the platform. Some of the top websites scores dropped significantly. That is why I am very impressed with the Google PageSpeed Insight scores that GoDaddy Shared Hosting is able to attain.

There are still a few suggestions there that you could work on like Defer Offscreen Images, Serve Images in Next-Gen Formats etc.

Or if you want to go all out on optimization then you could also add a CDN, buy a Premium DNS, Lazy Loading and more.

Looking at the Bitcatcha score you will see that the US visitors will have a breeze browsing your website. However foreign countries like Japan will need to wait a full second before the page starts printing content.

Conclusion

So far of all the Shared Hosting I have reviewed, GoDaddy is the one that shows the most promising result followed by HostGator then DreamHost.

If you are a starter blogger who is just starting then you might want to consider GoDaddy as your initial web hosting.

Later on, down the line, when your website starts getting traction then you could switch to a managed WordPress hosting or just go into the cloud WordPress hosting.

For the meantime I highly recommend GoDaddy as a starter blogger web hosting provider.