Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a reliable on demand cloud services platform. AWS is operated from 16 geographical regions. Amazon offers two services under AWS i.e Elastic Compute Cloud i.e “EC2”, and Amazon Simple Storage Service, i.e “S3”.
The platform is very reliable and widely used webmasters to host websites and web applications.
Initially the Amazon Web Services are quite affordable and you can even host your website for almost free but as your traffic grows and your website start receiving few lakhs of visitors every month, it may hurt your pocket badly.
In this article we’re going to tell you the best AWS alternatives that are cost efficient and as reliable as Amazon web services.
Digital Ocean
Despite the fact that Digital Ocean is a new company in the web hosting space, it has taken the market my storm. In a short period of time, Digital Ocean has become one of the largest infrastructure provider in the world. The company has a product for all kind of different cloud computing needs i.e Compute, Storage, Networking, Load Balancer, Monitoring, Apps & Teams. Digital Ocean offers solutions for Big Data, Web Apps, Websites, Hosted Services and Developer Tools.
For hosting a website or an application, Digital Ocean offers a cloud server, they call it droplet. A droplet can be deployed in less than a minute. All you need to do is, select an app, choose a size of your server and select a region, and you’re done.
You can control your droplet Programmatically using the command prompt.
Here are some of the features of Digital Ocean
- You can deploy multiple droplets with just few clicks using the control panel.
- You can scale the resources of your droplet up or down anytime you want based on your requirements.
- Take backups of your droplet anytime you want.
- Keep a close eye of your Droplet’s bandwidth, disk, and CPU levels.
- You can transfer the ownership of your Droplet’s snapshot to any other user.
- SSDs for better performance
- 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) network connectivity
- Enterprise-grade KVM hypervisors for better security and performance
The following Operating Systems and Apps are supported on Digital Ocean
- Ubuntu
- CentOS
- Debian
- Fedora
- CoreOS
- FreeBDS
- MongoDB
- ELK
- Docker
- Redis
- Node.Js
- Ruby On Rails
For different needs, Digital Ocean has a different plan to offer. Their plans starts from $5 per month and goes up to $640 per month.
The basic plan which cost $5 per month comes with 512 MB memory, 1 core processor, 20GB SSD storage, and 1 TB data transfer.
The second plan which cost $10 per month comes with 1GB of memory, 2 core processors, 40GB SSD storage, and 3 TB transfer.
To know more about Digital Ocean plans and pricing, you can visit their official website.
The biggest advantage of Digital Ocean is their “Community of developers”. They have a strong support team to help you out in every situation. They have a great library of tutorials, guides and how-to content which makes them a better alternative to AWS.
Vultr
Vultr is another top alternative for Amazon AWS. Like Digital Ocean, Vultr also offers cost-effective cloud computing solutions on SSD storage. Vultr is available in 15 cities in the World.
You can set up your server under a minute on Vultr with just a few clicks.
Like Amazon, Vultr also offers different solutions for different cloud computing needs. They have the following products in their portfolio.
- Vultr Cloud Compute (VC2)
- Block Storage
- Dedicated Cloud
Vultr Cloud Compute (VC2)
VC2 is a perfect solution for anyone wants to host a website, web application or want to create a development environment on a reliable cloud platform. Backed with 100% SSD storage, VC2 pricing starts from $2.5 per month i.e half of what Digital Ocean charge.
Their VC2 plans start from $2.5 per month and go up to $320 per month.
The basic plan which cost $2.5 per month comes with 1 CPU, 512 MB memory, and 500 GB bandwidth.
The highest plan which cost $320 per month comes with 16 CPU, 65536 MB memory, and 10000GB bandwidth.
There are six more VC2 plans available between the two plans that we’ve mentioned above.
Some of the major advantages of Vultr are
- Quick deployment of servers
- 15 locations worldwide
- 100% service level agreement (SLA) guarantee
- SSD storage
- Easy to use control panel
- powerful and reliable infrastructure
- Hourly billing
- Root level access
Block Storage
Block Storage is another service provided by Vultr. Using the Block Storage you can create expandable storage volumes and mount them from your Compute Instances. You can buy 10 GB to 1 TB storage from Vultr. The price starts from $1 per month and goes up to $1000 per month.
Dedicated Instances
If you don’t want to share your resources with anyone else, you can go for Vultr dedicated instances. The dedicated instances offer Dedicated CPU, RAM and SSD Drives. You can call dedicated instances as cloud dedicated servers. There are 4 plans for dedicated instances
The basic plan which cost $60 per month comes with 2 CPU, 8 GB RAM & 10TB Bandwidth.
The highest plan cost $240 per month and comes with 8 CPU, 32 GB RAM and 40 TB bandwidth.
Google Cloud
Google cloud is another Amazon AWS alternative. Unlike Vultr and Digital Ocean, the price of Google Cloud is comparatively higher. If you’re looking for an enterprise level cloud computing platform, Google Cloud is the best option for you.
Google cloud use the same technology that Google uses to run their own applications like Google search engine, Youtube and all other.
Major brands like Coca-Cola, Philips, Spotify, SnapChat, Wix and many others are already using Google cloud platform.
If you’re running a big website on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud is the closest alternative to AWS.
If you’re not confident if Google Cloud is the right fit for your requirement, you can take Google cloud trial worth $300.