Hosting Price Comparison
2020-06-02Hosting is generally a small part of a project's cost, but it is a cost that all projects have, and is worth optimizing. It also tends to grow
For our price comparison we'll use an example machine: 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, which is substantially more than most projects start with, but is a good example of a workhorse server for a production machine.
| Brand | CPU | RAM | Storage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OVH | 4c / 8t | 32 GB RAM | 4 TB | $39.59 |
| Digital Ocean | 8 vCPUs | 32 GB RAM | 640 GB SSD | $160.00 |
| Google Cloud | 8 vCPUs | 32 GB RAM | sold separately | $195.52 |
| AWS | 8 vCPUs | 32 GB RAM | sold separately | $221.76 |
| Microsoft Azure | 8 vCPUs | 32 GB RAM | 200 GB | $341.64 |
The numbers are pretty revealing — "bare-metal" hosting is 4-8x cheaper than cloud hosting. If you are going with cloud hosting, Digital Ocean offers a distinct advantage.
Bare-metal hosting has several additional advantages:
- Since it is single tenant you aren't exposed to the Meltdown or Spectre attacks, and can disable the CPU slowing mitigations.
- There is no virtualization overhead.
- You get actual CPUs rather than the somewhat vague "vCPU"s.
- You will get the full capabilities of the hardware and are not going to hit CPU / disk rate limiting.
- Your performance isn't going to vary depending on what other tenants are doing.
Digital Ocean is another good option. Besides beating out the competition in price you get:
- Predictable pricing — since AWS/GCP/Azure all bill for storage, networking, etc. services separately your bill is variable and hard to predict.
- Simpler control panel.
- Good team support — you can easily grant access to a subset of the account to different team members.