DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud Platform

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are both cloud computing services offering a range of cloud computing solutions to businesses and developers worldwide. However, their pricing and complexity levels make them attractive to different types of customers. DigitalOcean is known for its simplicity, developer-friendly features, and cost-effectiveness, making it an attractive choice for startups and small to medium-sized businesses. On the other hand, Google Cloud Platform, which is part of Alphabet, the parent company of Google search, has a large suite of services and a global network. This means that Google Cloud Platform often caters to large enterprises and businesses with complex requirements who can pay a higher cost for their cloud services. Understanding the unique strengths of DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud Platform is crucial for making informed decisions about which cloud provider best aligns with your specific business needs.

Differences between DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud Platform

Developers and businesses today have a number of choices to make around their cloud architecture and infrastructure setup. Choosing the right cloud provider is a critical decision, as it will impact your ability to scale over time, how much of your budget goes towards cloud spend, what skill sets you need to hire, and much more. DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform are both popular cloud choices, especially among developers, but have key differences in their offerings. As organizations evaluate their cloud infrastructure choices, understanding these cloud platforms’ nuances becomes essential to align cloud solutions with specific business goals, scalability demands, budget considerations, and performance expectations.

Pricing

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud platform differ significantly in terms of their pricing models. Two key differences between Google Cloud and DigitalOcean related to costs are pricing transparency and bandwidth pricing.

Pricing transparency

DigitalOcean is well-regarded for its straightforward and predictable pricing structure. The cloud computing platform offers fixed, flat-rate pricing for its resources, making it easy for users to estimate costs accurately. In contrast, the Google Cloud Platform pricing can be more complex, with various factors affecting the final bill, including instance type, storage, data transfer, regions utilized, and additional services, making cost estimation more challenging.

Bandwidth pricing

DigitalOcean offers a generous amount of included outbound data transfer or bandwidth for their virtual machines, called Droplets, starting at 500 GiB/month for the smallest plan and going up to 11,000 GiB/month. Bandwidth allowances are determined by the Droplet’s size and type. Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB.

Google Cloud Platform offers bandwidth pricing models differing according to the product. Their pricing range differs according to different regions and usage, but starts at a price of $0.12/GiB for the first TiB of usage for their default “Premium Tier”, which can quickly get very expensive especially for bandwidth-intensive workloads.

Ease of use

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform differ significantly in terms of ease of use, catering to distinct user preferences and expertise levels.

DigitalOcean’s cloud hosting is renowned for its simplicity and user-friendly interface. It is designed with developers and small to medium-sized businesses in mind, offering an intuitive platform that is easy to navigate. The platform’s one-click deployments and pre-configured Droplets streamline the process of launching and managing cloud resources, making it ideal for users with limited cloud computing experience. DigitalOcean’s straightforward documentation and tutorials further contribute to its ease of use, enabling users to quickly get started and efficiently manage their cloud infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform, on the other hand, provides a more extensive suite of services with a broader range of complexities. While it offers powerful tools and advanced capabilities, it may require a steeper learning curve for users with limited cloud experience. Therefore, Google Cloud Platform often caters to enterprises and developers seeking a highly customizable environment. While GCP may be more suitable for experienced users, beginners may find the platform more challenging to navigate due to its vast array of services and settings.

In summary, DigitalOcean excels in ease of use, appealing to users who value simplicity and want to quickly deploy and manage cloud resources. Google Cloud Platform targets users looking for a wider range of features that may support enterprise-level cloud architectures, which often makes it more complex to navigate for those without prior cloud computing expertise.

Customer Support

In addition to simplicity, customer support is extremely important for businesses, especially small businesses that don’t have a large number of employees. The customer support offerings of DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform differ in several aspects, including the cost for customers to get access to ticketed support systems.

DigitalOcean provides free ticket-based support to all customers. Paid support plans that grant access to additional resources and faster response times are also available, starting at a flat fee of just $24/month.

Google Cloud Platform also has several different support tiers—Basic, Standard, Enhanced, and Premium— each with varying response times, availability, and access to different support channels. However, unlike DigitalOcean’s free Starter support plan, Google Cloud Platform’s free Basic support tier only offers documentation and support for billing-related issues. Google Cloud’s paid support plans also have higher costs than DigitalOcean’s paid options, as pricing starts at $29/month plus a fee of 3% of total cloud spend per month. Similar to how AWS Support compares to DigitalOcean, this means that customers with a large monthly cloud spend pay more for support access.

In addition to the ticketed customer support offerings, DigitalOcean fosters an active and engaged community that is conducive to knowledge sharing and problem-solving. Users can seek advice from other community members and experts, providing an additional layer of support. DigitalOcean offers comprehensive documentation and tutorials, empowering users with step-by-step guides, code samples, and troubleshooting tips for seamless navigation and successful utilization of its cloud services.

DigitalOcean provides user-friendly and consistent customer support, appealing to businesses with responsive assistance and a vibrant community. Google Cloud Platform offers tiered support for diverse needs, but is more expensive and their documentation can be quite hard to navigate due to the wide range of products offered.

Products from DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud Platform

Another key way DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform differ is in their product suite. While Google Cloud Platform offers a large range of cloud computing products, DigitalOcean offers a small suite of products tailored to the needs of small businesses. These include virtual machines for hosting web applications, storage solutions, managed databases, managed Kubernetes, and more. When searching for cloud computing services, businesses should consider the product set they need to implement their desired cloud architecture. Below are some of the key differences in cloud hosting products offered from DigitalOcean vs Google Cloud Platform.

Virtual machines

DigitalOcean offers a range of virtual machines, with prices starting at $4 per month for a standard VM and $7/month for a Premium Intel or Premium AMD virtual machine. GCP’s virtual machines are often more expensive and charges based on hourly usage. Pricing also differs by region, which can make estimating prices complex. However, for an E2 standard virtual machine with 2 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, the monthly Google Cloud Platform cost would be $48.92 without additional bandwidth charges (prices accurate as of August 2023). DigitalOcean offers a wide variety of VM types, including standard, high memory, high CPU, and GPU VMs through Paperspace. GCP also offers several virtual machine configurations, including memory-optimized and compute-optimized.

Cloud Storage

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) differ in terms of storage options and their respective benefits. DigitalOcean Spaces is a scalable object storage service offered by DigitalOcean, while Google Cloud Platform provides various storage solutions, including Google Cloud Storage.

Managed Databases

DigitalOcean and Google Cloud Platform offer managed database solutions for applications, eliminating the need for manual maintenance. With DigitalOcean, you can swiftly build and manage data with user-friendly access to multiple databases including MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, and PostgreSQL, while Google Cloud SQL provides reliable and scalable MySQL databases, and Google also offers several other database solutions. DigitalOcean’s Managed Databases provide features like multi-node clustering, automated failover, and daily backups with Point in Time Recovery.

Managed Kubernetes

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) offers a fully managed Kubernetes service with seamless deployment and strong security features on Google Cloud. Meanwhile, DigitalOcean Kubernetes provides an affordable, scalable, and secure container orchestration platform integrated with other DigitalOcean services. While both options have their merits, DigitalOcean’s managed Kubernetes stands out for its cost-effectiveness starting at $12 per month per node. DigitalOcean Kubernetes also offers easy deployment and seamless integration within the DigitalOcean ecosystem, making it a favorable choice for developers seeking reliability and affordability in container management.

Platform as a Service Solutions

DigitalOcean’s App Platform streamlines app development with easy code deployment, auto-scaling, and diverse language support. Suited for startups, it boasts user-friendly interface and seamless integration. Google Cloud’s App Engine offers robust PaaS, scaling, managed runtimes, and advanced features via Google Cloud’s ecosystem, catering to larger enterprises.

Try DigitalOcean as a Google Cloud Platform alternative today

DigitalOcean is an excellent alternative to Google Cloud and other hyperscalers for startups, SMBs, and individual developers who value simplicity and cost-effectiveness in their cloud-enhanced database services. It offers many of the products most used by Google Cloud customers, including a range of virtual machines for various use cases, such as CPU-optimized virtual machines, Managed Databases, Managed Kubernetes, and both object storage and block storage solutions. Sign up for a DigitalOcean account today to try it for yourself.