DigitalOcean vs AWS for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

DigitalOcean Overview

DigitalOcean is built for developers who want cloud infrastructure without the complexity of enterprise platforms. Droplets (VPS instances) start at $4/month with fixed pricing, so you always know what you're going to pay. The dashboard is clean, documentation is excellent, and provisioning a server takes under a minute.

Beyond Droplets, DigitalOcean offers managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB), App Platform (PaaS), Kubernetes, Spaces (S3-compatible object storage), and load balancers. The product lineup covers what most web applications need without overwhelming you with 200+ services.

I've run production applications on DigitalOcean for years. The experience is consistently straightforward. Spin up a Droplet, SSH in, deploy your app. Or use App Platform for managed deployments. Pricing is predictable and the interface never makes me feel lost.

AWS Overview

AWS is the largest cloud platform in the world with over 200 services spanning compute, storage, databases, machine learning, IoT, and everything in between. EC2 instances, S3 storage, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and CloudFront CDN are just the beginning.

The platform can do literally anything. That's both its strength and its weakness for solo developers. Every feature exists, but finding the right one and configuring it correctly takes real effort. The AWS console is notoriously complex, and the pricing page reads like a legal document.

I've used AWS for both personal projects and enterprise work. For enterprise teams with dedicated DevOps engineers, it's the gold standard. For a solo developer spinning up a web app, it's like driving a semi-truck to the grocery store. It works, but there's a lot of unused capability.

Key Differences

Complexity. This is the fundamental divide. DigitalOcean has a focused product line that covers 90% of what web developers need. AWS has everything but requires significant learning investment. Setting up a VPS on DigitalOcean takes 2 minutes through the dashboard. Setting up an equivalent EC2 instance on AWS involves security groups, VPCs, IAM roles, key pairs, and elastic IPs. The outcome is the same, but the journey is drastically different.

Pricing clarity. DigitalOcean's pricing is fixed and predictable. A $12/month Droplet costs $12/month. Period. AWS pricing depends on instance type, usage hours, data transfer, storage type, IOPS, region, reserved vs. on-demand, and dozens of other variables. I've seen solo developers hit unexpected AWS bills because they forgot about data transfer charges or left a service running.

Documentation and community. DigitalOcean's tutorials are some of the best on the internet. Clear, step-by-step guides for everything from setting up Nginx to deploying Django. AWS documentation is comprehensive but often written for enterprise architects, not solo developers trying to ship a side project.

Service breadth. AWS wins here, no contest. Need a managed Elasticsearch cluster? AWS has it. Want ML model hosting? SageMaker. IoT device management? AWS IoT Core. DigitalOcean covers web application infrastructure well but lacks specialized services. If your project needs something niche, AWS probably has a managed service for it.

Scaling ceiling. Both platforms can scale, but AWS has a higher ceiling. DigitalOcean handles most web applications fine, but if you're building something that needs global CDN, edge computing, serverless functions, and managed ML pipelines all together, AWS provides the full integrated ecosystem.

Free tier. AWS offers a 12-month free tier with 750 hours of t2.micro EC2, 5GB S3, and limited RDS usage. DigitalOcean offers $200 in credits for 60 days. AWS's free tier is better for long-term experimentation. DigitalOcean's credits are better for a quick sprint to launch.

When to Choose DigitalOcean

• You want simple, predictable pricing without surprises
• Clean documentation and an intuitive dashboard matter to you
• Your project is a web application, API, or database-backed service
• You don't want to learn cloud infrastructure just to deploy an app
• Budget predictability is important for your bootstrapped project

When to Choose AWS

• Your project needs specialized services (ML, IoT, analytics, edge computing)
• You want the broadest possible ecosystem under one provider
• You're building something that could scale to enterprise-level traffic
• You already know AWS or have time to invest in learning it
• The 12-month free tier is valuable for your timeline

The Verdict

For the vast majority of solo developer projects, DigitalOcean is the better choice. The pricing is transparent, the dashboard is clean, the documentation is excellent, and the product lineup covers everything a typical web application needs.

AWS makes sense when your project has specialized requirements that DigitalOcean can't cover, or when you're building for eventual enterprise scale. But for launching a SaaS, deploying an API, or running a web app, AWS adds complexity without proportional benefit.

My recommendation: use DigitalOcean until your project outgrows it. Most solo developer projects never will. If you hit a ceiling, migrating to AWS later is straightforward because the core concepts (VPS, databases, object storage) transfer directly.