DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr

Are you looking to know more about DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr? Here is an in-depth analysis of these three cloud providers, including the core features, SLAs, data center location, and pricing structure.

The use of cloud computing is expeditiously enlarging among startups, big companies and SMEs because of its cost-efficient and scalable solutions.

It is known for providing computing resources ‘as a service’, and its significant models are PaaS, IaaS, BaaS and SaaS.

Although numerous vendors are conferring cloud computing services to businesses but Vultr, DigitalOcean and Linode are some prominent names here.

So, this article initiates to present a thorough comparison to explain everything about these platforms. Indeed, this guide gives all answers regarding DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Linode.

DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr – Overview

Here is a simple infographic that provides an overview about these three cloud providers.

What is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean, Inc. is a New York City headquartered company that commenced its journey in 2011. It is a leading cloud computing service provider with 14 international data centers and clients from 185 countries worldwide. With 99.99% uptime, this platform is facilitating around 623k customers globally.

DigitalOcean is equally beneficial for startups, SMEs and big enterprises to build, host and deploy mobile and web applications. However, you can also facilitate from this IaaS platform to host Blockchains, operate VPN servers and deal with SaaS solutions.

Moreover, DigitalOcean is not only famous for creating and launching serverless apps, but extensible virtual machines, databases, SSD cloud servers and seamless APIs also make it prominent among users.

Indeed, it owns 11k+ followers on StackShare, and the major clients of DigitalOcean are GitLab, Slack and Ghost.

DigitalOcean Core Features

These features will help developers and businesses to compare DigitalOcean with Linode and Vultr smoothly.

Compute

Compute products of DigitalOcean provide complete infrastructure to businesses and development teams to create and administer their applications. Here are the core products of DigitalOcean under its compute section:

Droplets — DigitalOcean facilitates its clients with reasonable Virtual Machines (VMs) and costs around $80 for 8 CPUs. This price is less compared to Google Cloud, AWS and Azure. With 99.99% uptime, seamless security and smooth deployment, Droplets definitely differentiate DigitalOcean from competitors like Linode and Vultr.

Kubernetes — DOKS enables the development teams to set up Kubernetes clusters with the help of a freemium control plane with automatic scalability. It doesn’t only release the apps rapidly but also offers a very inexpensive experience. Indeed, its monthly charges only start from $10.

App Platform — This product of DigitalOcean permits the developers to publish their scripts with the help of servers without taking care of infrastructure and dependencies. Yes, through this function, you can access the PaaS properties of DigitalOcean.

Functions — DigitalOcean Functions is another ideal product that consists of serverless and scalable solutions. Developers can efficiently operate on-demand projects without investing in servers’ management when they use Functions.

Networking

DigitalOcean doesn’t only aid the developers in building, deploying and releasing applications, but it also provides proper control and safety to deal with your app’s traffic.

Hereof, Virtual Private Cloud authorizes businesses to protect their private cloud resources completely. You can create a VPC Network by choosing the preferred data center region within a few seconds only.

On the other hand, users can conveniently deploy Cloud Firewalls by using DigitalOcean’s dashboard for free. Another attractive feature of DigitalOcean is Load Balancers that you can utilize and set up with APIs.

Developer Tools

DigitalOcean comes with a variety of valuable tools. Its API product aids in setting up and controlling Droplets and other operations.

Similarly, CLI integration tools and infrastructure monitoring help developers to deal with PaaS operations easily.

Fortunately, developers can benefit from 24/7 support in case of any query. On the contrary, its ‘DigitalOcean Teams’ product also impresses clients. It offers 2-factor authentication and doesn’t bind with any team member limit.

Storage

DigitalOcean delivers its storage services into 2 following products:

Block Storage Volumes — This is very extensible SSD-backed storage that enables the developers to gather extra data of Droplets with excellent security. Development teams can also resize the storage in real-time. Moreover, its monthly cost only starts from $0.10/GB.

Spaces — DigitalOcean also improves performance, load time and overcomes the infrastructure charges with its S3-compatible object storage. Indeed, you can fulfill your storage needs without any complexity by using the built-in CDN storage capabilities of DigitalOcean Spaces.

Managed Databases

It is definitely complicated to deploy, update, administer and protect databases through typical means. So, DigitalOcean empowers its customers with fully managed databases. In this regard, it offers 4 major databases: MySQL, Redis, and PostgreSQL.

DigitalOcean Pricing Structure

The pricing structure of DigitalOcean is simple, and it comes with flat rates and monthly caps. Hereof, it displays flat rates for the following 9 products on its pricing page:

Droplets: It is one of the most significant and used products of DigitalOcean. The monthly cost of Basic Droplets commences from $5 for 25GB SSD and 1 virtual CPU.

Kubernetes: The essential cost of DOKS begins from $10/month with a free control plane. However, this price will go around $40/month with a high availability control plane.

Spaces: This S3-compatible object storage only asks for $5 per month for 250GB of storage from users. Withal, for additional resources, you will have to pay $0.02/GB for storage and $0.01/GB for transfer.

App Platform: The Starter plan of App Platform is entirely free, but the starting fee of its Basic program is $5/month.

Databases: Users will only have to pay $15/month for a 15GB disk and 1GB memory to get the Managed Databases service of DigitalOcean.

Functions: This newly added feature comes with a free starting tag.

Volumes: DigitalOcean only demands a $10 monthly fee for 100GB of block storage.

Load Balancers: The monthly price of Load Balancers starts from $10.

Container Registry: The Starter plan of this product is entirely free, but it is only suitable for testing. However, for 5 repositories and 5GB storage, it charges $5/month under its Basic plan.

DigitalOcean Advantages

Fast Deployment

DigitalOcean is known for rapid deployment. It only takes 55 seconds to conduct its setup operation.

Predictable & Affordable Pricing Structure

The pricing structure of DigitalOcean is predictable and very reasonable. Businesses and startups can anticipate the pricing for their projects with its flat rates and monthly caps.

Furthermore, it is also convenient to extend resources while using the pricing model of DigitalOcean.

Highly Secure

DigitalOcean is one of the most secure cloud computing service providers. Whether you are looking for the safety of your app’s traffic or want a trusted environment for your team, DigitalOcean is the best choice.

Hereof, DigitalOcean offers 2-factor authentication, cloud firewalls, private networking and centralized billing.

Massive Storage

Businesses can experience one of the most extensive storage opportunities with DigitalOcean. Yes, it empowers its clients to get maximum SSD-backed storage of 16TB.

The backing of fully managed databases also improves the data gathering process with this PaaS platform.

Keep reading to know more about Linode vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr.

What is Linode?

Linode is a Pennsylvania-based cloud computing company that came into existence in 2003. It streamlines an infrastructure to build and deploy applications.

In this regard, it also confers robust backing of Linux VMs and effective cloud hosting solutions.

Furthermore, with 99.99% uptime SLA and 11 data centers in different cities globally, it is considered one of the leading IaaS providers in the cloud industry. Similarly, it has around 1 million customers from 185 countries of the world because of its trusted and reasonable Linux solutions and cloud services.

This IaaS platform provides excellent support for all sizes of businesses, including startups, large enterprises and SMEs. Hereof, it offers eLearning, managed hosting, video streaming, SaaS and multi-cloud solutions to its users.

The major companies and applications that are using cloud hosting and IaaS products of Linode are BestBuy, Panasonic, Marco Polo, WHO, etc.

Linode Core Features

Here are the vital features of Linode:

Compute

Linode grants compute instances into the following significant categories to create and release applications with great scalability.

Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) — This container orchestration engine aids developers in creating and deploying applications within a few steps efficiently. You can access, build and administer the LKE cluster with the help of Linode API. Also, you don’t have to pay additional fees to approach more resources in this regard. Horizontal Cluster Autoscaling is another exciting advantage of using LKE because it automatically enhances your required resources according to the needs of your project.

GPU — NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 effectively empowers the GPU performance of Linode for different video processing, AI and cloud computing tasks. The availability of on-demand GPU and specific plans also differentiate Linode from competitors.

Bare Metal — Bare Metal dedicated servers give complete control to users to deal with their projects with maximum security. This feature of Linode also helps the coders to improve on-premises development.

Dedicated CPU — If you want compelling infrastructure for your CPU-centric computing tasks and applications, then you should consider the dedicated CPU function of Linode. Competition-free resources, CI/CD support and tailored pricing are also benefits of using Linode Dedicated CPU.

Networking

Networking tools are essential to smoothly handle the infrastructure, security, and traffic of your project. Hereof, Linode confers Cloud Firewall Protection to take charge of your network traffic. This Cloud Firewall function sets 25 rules, and developers can utilize them for various instances to improve scalability.

By the same token, NodeBalancers ensure the availability of your application and regularly checks its health score. Moreover, DNS Manager, DDoS protection and VLAN are also appealing benefits of networking with Linode.

Storage

Compared to DigitalOcean and Vultr, Linode divides its storage products into these 3 categories:

Block Storage — With the Block Storage property of Linode, developers can enhance their data gathering capacity up to 10TB. You can gather any kind of data here. It is also hot-swappable and extensible. Also, it allows handling the volumes autonomously.

Object Storage — It is an S3 compatible storage solution that only costs $5 for 250GB. That is still less than competitors like AWS and Google Cloud Storage. Linode Object Storage can also gather critical data and is highly available.

Backups — If you have reservations about your backups, then you can store your data locally. Yes, Linode offers its users to get fully managed local backups that could be done manually or through auto-enroll means.

Developer Tools

Businesses love to benefit from the developer tools of Linode to deal with the infrastructure of their applications seamlessly. In this regard, Linode CLI helps to set up Linux servers with the powerful backing of Linode APIs. Similarly, Linode Terraform has the ability to manage cloud infrastructure of all forms and sizes.

Easy integrations, user permissions and StackScript library are also one of the finest development tools that Linode offers.

Databases

Linode is also known for its fully-managed database deployment. This IaaS platform provides deployment services for prominent databases, including, MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, it works best for MySQL database applications.

Linode Pricing Structure

This IaaS provider offers a flat pricing structure to users. We are sharing the basic details that it asks for different products below:

Linode Kubernetes Engine: Although LKE pricing depends on the resource that you use, but its flat monthly rates are $60/cluster.

Block Storage: It costs $0.10/GB from users on a monthly basis.

Object Storage: Linode doesn’t cost anything for a 500 GB transfer. But, its charges for 250 GB storage are only $5.

NodeBalancers: The monthly cost of using this feature is $10.

Compute: The monthly charges of Dedicated CPU and Shared CPU start from $30 and $5, respectively. However, customers will have to pay $1000/month to access 32 GB RAM and 16 TB for transfer under its GPU plan.

Linode Advantages

Highly Reliable

Linux is one of the most trusted and used development environments. According to a recent Stack Overflow survey, developers ranked Linux-based operating systems at the 2nd position that they like to work with. Linode also comes with robust backing of Linux cloud hosting that makes it a very reliable platform among IaaS developers.

User-Friendly Interface

Whether you are a novice developer or working in the cloud computing world for years, it is very simple to use the Linode dashboard. Users can’t only benefit from Linode APIs, Cloud Manager and CLI but can also customize the teams’ access according to their roles.

Affordable & Predictable Pricing

Linode is a very affordable IaaS provider that is cheaper than AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Also, it is not complicated to get pricing quotes from Linode because it has a flat pricing policy. Even you can even visit its ‘Cloud Estimator’ page to conveniently envisage the actual cost for your project.

Customer Support

The customer support of Linode is outstanding. Their customer service representatives are available 24/7 to answer all inquiries of customers. Stevie Awards have also awarded it for great customer services in 2022. Yes, it has achieved the titles of ‘Customer Service Department of the Year’ and ‘Best Customer Engagement Initiative’.

What is Vultr?

Vultr is an advanced and powerful cloud hosting platform that David Aninowsky endowed to the development community in 2014.

This IaaS platform simplifies the deployment of cloud servers and offers various other features such as storage, advanced network and much more. Most of the businesses also prefer to use Vultr because of its 100% SSD support and speedy virtual CPUs.

This cloud hosting platform has data centers in 25 different cities worldwide. Furthermore, Vultr has served more than 1.5 million customers from 150 countries of the world. These customers have also deployed 45 million instances by using Vultr.

HUND, CodeCraft, and ScaleChamp are leading companies claiming to use Vultr on StackShare.

Vultr Core Features

Here are the core features of using Vultr:

Compute

Cloud compute of Vultr has the ability to spin the VMs in 60 seconds, which is suitable for all types of applications. Here are the further features that Vultr grants under its compute services:

Vultr Kubernetes Engine — Like Linode and DigitalOcean, Vultr also offers fully managed and containerized app deployment. Its highly scalable VKE and free control plane enable the developers to set up applications conveniently without complexities. Vultr is also CNCF certified, so you can easily switch your workload to this IaaS platform.

Cloud GPU — Easy to handle virtual GPUs is also one of the attractive products of Vultr. It facilitates the developers with GPU cards like NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA A40 and NVIDIA A16. Vultr Cloud GPU charges start from $90/month.

Bare Metal Simplified — With the help of Vultr Bare Metal, you can directly deal with physical servers. Luckily, the Bare Metal instances of Vultr are available at 19 different locations around the world.

Storage

Vultr provides these 2 kinds of products for storage:

Object Storage — This product grants scalable and easy to adjust storage facilities to development teams. They can handle data under this storage by using S3 API. Even coders can connect Object Storage with third-party and S3-compatible applications. On the contrary, it is not only cheap to benefit from Object Storage, but you can predict the charges from the Object Storage page of Vultr.

Block Storage — If you are in search of SSD-backed storage for only $1/month, then you should consider using Block Storage of Vultr. Yes, it permits the businesses to store 10 GB for only $1/month. However, customers can use this Vultr storage for up to 10TB of data.

Networking

Vultr is packed with a variety of products to conduct networking activities smoothly. First of all, if we talk about Load Balancers, then they enhance reliability and authorize the horizontal scaling. You can deploy and operate these Load Balances in seconds.

On the contrary, it also gives powerful VPC peering, reserved IPs and DDoS protection that make Vultr networking valuable for customers.

Databases

Right now, Vultr is only supporting an open-source database that is MySQL. However, its official site claims this IaaS vendor is going to start supporting Redis and PostgreSQL in the coming days. Moreover, you can also contact the Vultr team if you are interested in Grafana, Kafka, Elasticsearch databases.

Vultr Pricing Structure

This cloud computing service provider offers a flat pricing model. Withal, we are sharing the basic prices of its major products here.

Cloud Compute: Vultr takes $6/month for 25GB storage with the backing of NVMe SSD and AMD EPYC. By the same token, with the powerful support of NVMe SSD and 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPUs, this IaaS platform costs $6/month for 1TB bandwidth and 32GB storage.

Cloud GPU: The charges of Cloud GPU begin from $90/month under the NVIDIA A100 GPU plan of Vultr.

Bare Metal: The basic plan of Bare Metal only costs $120 monthly for users.

Kubernetes Engine: VKE charges a minimum of $70/month from users with a trustworthy control plane.

Load Balancers: It comes with a flat rate that takes $10 monthly and $0.015 for hourly use.

Vultr Advantages

User-Friendly Interface

The interface of Vultr is user-friendly for development teams. It is very smooth to choose the right server and deal with other products of Vultr because of its handy control panel and interface. You can examine the performance of your application through Vultr’s dashboard by using both mobile and desktop devices.

Incredible Infrastructure

Vultr provides an incredible infrastructure to its users. Indeed, businesses can spin instances by using various operating systems such as Windows, CentOS, Alma Linux, Debian, Fedora and much more. NVIDIA powered GPUs, 100% SSD, and dedicated servers make it a perfect choice for startups, big companies and SMEs.

Predictable Pricing

Vultr offers flexible and cheap pricing compared to its competitors like AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Although it doesn’t provide particular calculators like Linode, but few of its product pages enable the users to predict the project fee easily.

Moreover, you can also visit its ‘Pricing’ page to get every single detail about its flat costs for different services. It is only up to customers whether they want to go with hourly or monthly charges when it comes to pay. Yes, Vultr mentioned both monthly and hourly pricing details separately.

Conclusion

This article gives a complete overview of DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr. It discusses all aspects, including core products, features, advantages and pricing structures of these IaaS platforms in detail.

Hopefully, this thorough comparison of DigitalOcean with Linode and Vultr will aid our readers in picking the right cloud computing service for their ventures.

FAQ