Vultr | DO vs. "Big Boys" - AWS | Azure

IRJ

Are DO and Vultr prices that much lower than the big boys these days? Does the performance differ very much?

I've been very happy with my webserver from DO. I have a a mirror of it over at Vultr as well. I have the $20 plan

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

WingCreative

I started my path down VPS hosting on DO and later Vultr - mainly for hosting clients' WordPress webservers. I think their biggest advantages are predictable pricing and user-friendly admin interfaces. It's really nice to be able to say "Hosting is going to be $12/month" and know that will be true for the foreseeable future, versus trying to explain/predict AWS' pricing which is more like paying a utility bill. It's also really easy to get a development server up and running quickly without having to worry about all the details.

With all of that said, I haven't gone back to DO or Vultr since I learned how to work AWS EC2 instances. For one thing, it's a much easier sell to say "I'm hosting your site on the same physical infrastructure that powers Netflix" than trying to explain the advantages of VPS hosting to non-techie people. With reserved instance pricing, you can really cut down on the extra costs typically associated with using AWS as well...

The biggest thing for me is that, last I checked, DO and Vultr both charge you full price for any VPS associated with your account, whether or not it's running. You need to totally destroy a VPS to stopped being billed for it. AWS (and I would assume other "big players" in this space) only charges you for data storage of stopped instances, which is a relatively tiny part of the usual hosting cost.

This is a big advantage for me as I can keep staging/development copies of webservers ready to go without paying full price for their existence or having to wait for a whole new instance to spin up. This has been really nice with the regularity of platform updates on WordPress and the importance of applying them quickly...

scottalanmiller

@WingCreative said:

I started my path down VPS hosting on DO and later Vultr - mainly for hosting clients' WordPress webservers. I think their biggest advantages are predictable pricing and user-friendly admin interfaces. It's really nice to be able to say "Hosting is going to be $12/month" and know that will be true for the foreseeable future, versus trying to explain/predict AWS' pricing which is more like paying a utility bill. It's also really easy to get a development server up and running quickly without having to worry about all the details.

Well AWS does point out that they are a utility AWS is the only unpredictable one, though. Everyone has set monthly pricing the same as DO and Vultr. We never see unexpected bills.

scottalanmiller

@WingCreative said:

The biggest thing for me is that, last I checked, DO and Vultr both charge you full price for any VPS associated with your account, whether or not it's running. You need to totally destroy a VPS to stopped being billed for it. AWS (and I would assume other "big players" in this space) only charges you for data storage of stopped instances, which is a relatively tiny part of the usual hosting cost.

No, AWS is alone there. Rackspace, Azure, etc. have always charged for systems that are off, because the capacity remains reserved for you.

stacksofplates

I use Vultr for my website. It's nice because it's cheap and I don't get a ton of traffic so I don't need much. Hard to beat $5 a month for simple things like that.

Alex Sage

@johnhooks Funny thing is you could like host a few dozen small sites with the same resources.

stacksofplates

@aaronstuder said:

@johnhooks Funny thing is you could like host a few dozen small sites with the same resources.

My site is running in an LXC container. So if I ever want to make any more, I have the ability.

scottalanmiller

@johnhooks said:

I use Vultr for my website. It's nice because it's cheap and I don't get a ton of traffic so I don't need much. Hard to beat $5 a month for simple things like that.

You could host tons of sites on ASO for $5/mo and not need to even maintain a server

stacksofplates

@scottalanmiller said:

@johnhooks said:

I use Vultr for my website. It's nice because it's cheap and I don't get a ton of traffic so I don't need much. Hard to beat $5 a month for simple things like that.

You could host tons of sites on ASO for $5/mo and not need to even maintain a server

I can't use drush on shared hosting though. I have two Drupal sites on my Vultr server right now. One is the main site, the other is a mileage tracking system I use for my business.

Updating Drupal on shared hosting is enough to make you want to pay $5 a month for a VPS.

scottalanmiller

What does Drush do? What requirements does it have that keep it from getting installed?

stacksofplates

@scottalanmiller said:

What does Drush do? What requirements does it have that keep it from getting installed?

Drush is a CLI tool for Drupal. You can pretty much manage your whole site with it. But you need root access (or sudo).

If you update Drupal manually on shared hosting you pretty much have to back up the whole site, redownload the new Drupal version, reupload your sites folder (where all your info is), change the DB settings file, and chmod it.

With drush you type drush up drupal and you're done.

Or if you want to update everything (modules and themes also) type drush up

It's more of a pain with shared hosting to do all of that also.