DigitalOcean vs AWS
Both appear in 4 sections: compute, object storage, egress, footprint. DigitalOcean is cheaper on 8 of 8 comparable measures.
These two are priced for different customers and the storage tables show it. DigitalOcean Spaces is sold as a plan: $5 a month includes 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of transfer, with overage at $0.02/GB-month for storage and $0.01/GB for egress. S3 Standard charges $0.023/GB-month with no included allowance and $0.09/GB for egress beyond the first 100 GB. For a small site the DigitalOcean plan is far cheaper and much easier to predict: $5 covers most projects entirely, where the same usage on AWS is metered from the first gigabyte and the egress rate is nine times higher. At scale the comparison inverts in character rather than price. AWS is still more expensive per byte served, but it offers storage classes, lifecycle rules, replication, object lock and the tooling every data pipeline already speaks, and if your compute is in EC2 there is no egress charge to reach it. DigitalOcean's Spaces is deliberately simple: S3-compatible, one storage class, a CDN included, and a bill you can predict. The honest recommendation is that for anything small to medium where predictability matters more than features, DigitalOcean's flat plan is the better deal by a wide margin. For a large or complex workload, particularly one already inside AWS, S3's ecosystem is what you are paying the premium for.
Compute
All compute →| Metric | DigitalOcean | AWS |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest 2 vCPU, 4 GBper month | $24.00Cheaperdo-2vcpu-4gb-80gb↗ | $32.70t4g.large (ap-south-1)↗ |
| Cheapest 4 vCPU, 8 GBper month | $48.00Cheaperdo-4vcpu-8gb-160gb↗ | $65.41t4g.xlarge (ap-south-1)↗ |
| Cheapest 8 vCPU, 16 GBper month | $96.00Cheaperdo-8vcpu-16gb-320gb↗ | $130.82t4g.2xlarge (ap-south-1)↗ |
Object storage
All object storage →Egress
All egress →Footprint
All footprint →| Metric | DigitalOcean | AWS |
|---|---|---|
| Regionshigher is better | 9Cheaper8 countries | 87 countries |
Pikkly earns nothing from AWS, and the ranking above is by price regardless.