Digital Ocean or AWS?
Hi guys! I am stuck between using AWS or Digital Ocean to host my website Jemsplash. Jemsplash is an online marketplace for creators who sell digital products like ebooks, online courses, memberships, pdfs, guides, software licenses, etc.
It will be a heavily loaded website and I want to make sure I make the right decision in this. I am open to all suggestions seeing that I lack knowledge when it comes to hosting a platform like this.
I use both depending on where my project is at. Regardless of project though I will always use S3 for file storage.
My general feeling is that when I have users who have adopted my platform and we are growing, I shift to AWS. I find this is because the toolset they provide is second-to-none. But I usually start out on DigitalOcean as I find it much cheaper, user friendly, and much quicker to get started.
Your website sounds (and I may be mistaken) that it's more traffic heavy but should not be so database heavy. So I would imagine Digital Ocean would be more than sufficient for your needs, especially as you have not got much experience with the two platforms, the learning curve is much steeper for AWS.
I think this depends on your technical requirements. If all you need is a VM (virtual machine), then I'd probably recommend Digital Ocean (or google cloud/GCP). AWS is a good choice if you've decided to opt-in to many of their proprietary services. AWS has a significant learning curve and a very confusing UI. They are security first, which is great -- but means you sometimes have to learn a lot just to do basic stuff due to the security model.
Depending on your stack, you might also find other free or cheaper alternatives. I'm quite fond of https://www.netlify.com, https://vercel.com and https://render.com for simple apps. Even Heroku may fit your needs better for specific stacks/requirements.
AWS and DO are wildly different. There are also a ton of other platforms and hosting providers in the world. I'd chose the best bang for your buck server that's also close to your customer base!
I voted for AWS due to the expected heavy load and the fact that you will need to securely store lots of access and make them available via CDN. You can also look at something like Terraform for managing your AWS env in a nice clean fashion.
DigitalOcean is great, but I only use it for simple websites. Anything complex, I put on AWS.
AWS by far. I have tried using DigitalOcean MANY times and it literally blocks your account automatically for some odd reason and then you have to reach out to them to unblock. I love the DigitalOcean interface but after experiencing that TWICE, I left them to AWS and never looked back!
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