AWS vs. Digital Ocean vs. Hetzner Cloud — Which Has the Best Value for Money?
If you are looking for a cheap yet reliable Cloud Provider to host your great application, don’t worry, I found it already.
I like to have a choice but don’t like to choose — Vlad Mykol
Even though all these cloud providers have various options for every scale, today I’ll show you my experience working with them, concentrating on the best choice for the lowest price as low budgeting is crucial for small startups or own pet projects just like mine.
Amazon Web Services
When I was looking for a server to host my application, the first that came to my mind was AWS, so I took a trial period and launched my first EC2 instance. Truly, AWS is a great place to host your enterprise solution, automate lots of things, make it scalable, highly available and protect from failures. But do you need all these pricey perks from the very beginning? In most cases, the answer would be — No, as long as you can evolve and move to this in future.
Beeing Agile means starting with something very basic, simple and cheap to grow and upgrade in future
Soon after, I realized that my bare minimum monthly AWS bill was more than 70$ a month, and it was way too big for a non-profit pet project.
You may spot that the most pricy thing here is DocumentDB, but otherwise, I had to setup MongoDB on an EC2 instance, which already was beyond my DevOps skills and could take lots of time to do, so I even did not consider this option.
Digital Ocean
When I started digging around, my friend recommended exploring Digital Ocean, which his company was widely using for their new projects. After a very first glance at the Pricing page, I realized that it’s even cheaper than the AWS Spot EC2 instance but without any fear to be taken down at any time on high demand.
What I really liked about Digital Ocean is their 1-click apps. It’s just a simple thing to start from and create your real application server without much hassle.
I selected the cheapest droplet option here with 1GB of RAM. When I finally deployed my first Java Spring Boot app using Dokku, it was constantly running out of memory as 1GB turned out to be too small for almost anything, so I had to rescale to one for 10$ and 2GB of memory. It was just a one-button-click job.
Unfortunately, Digital Ocean doesn't have a so-called SLA just like AWS but my application was running here for around 1 year and I did not have any downtime during that time.
Hetzner Cloud
After a while, I met a fellow who told me about Hetzner Cloud. He was hosting here his own Startup infrastructure with hundreds of users daily, mainly from Europe. He had excellent feedback about the service they’ve got for this low price.
Most Hetzner servers are located in Germany, and the smallest option here already has 2GB of memory and costs even less than 5$. The next day my server was already running in Hetzner in a test mode.
I was still using Dokku to take care of all the DevOps staff, and the only difference from Digital Ocean was installing Dokku myself first as there are no 1-click apps here.
Other than that, it has all the essentials you need to start your app in the Cloud, along with Load Balancers, Backups, Graphs dashboards and Networking.
So I would say Hetzner Cloud is the same as Digital Ocean but less popular hence cheaper. My application has been running here for 4 months already (as of March 2022) and for now, I am super happy with its stability and performance.
Final thoughts
You have to choose Cloud Provider based on your needs:
- AWS — if you have a big enterprise application and you want to move it from On-premise to Cloud or plant to grow really fast.
- Digital Ocean — if you just starting your application and looking for a cheap yet reliable Cloud with the minimum required things to start.
- Hetzner Cloud — all the same as Digital Ocean but even cheaper.
As you might have guessed already, Hetzner is where I host my pet project currently and this is what I recommend for small projects or startups to start from as a low-budget option.
I will be glad to hear and consider your recommendations in the comments for any other simple, reliable Cloud provider that you or your friends have hands-on with and why they are better than the above ones.
