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Evaluating European Cloud Hosting Alternatives

If you are looking to compare Digital Ocean, AWS and other European Cloud alternatives, then you're in the right spot!

DigitalOcean: a relentless focus on simplicity.

Compared to traditional VPS hosters, DigitalOcean has a better interface and superior virtualization technology. Being KVM powered ourselves, we could not agree more with that choice.

AWS Hosting is versatile

AWS on the other hand is the first choice when true versatility is required. Few other providers support cloud native use cases, enterprise workloads and anything in between as well as Amazon does.

But here's the thing. There is no one size fits all. Different projects have different requirements and many developer teams proudly only agree to disagree.

So when the VPS like use case that DigitalOcean focuses on is all you need their simplicity is hard to beat. On the other hand, when you need all the versatility of AWS you are prepared to live with the complexity this brings.

We built Exoscale for teams that need more than DigitalOcean but don't want the AWS enterprise features to get in the way.

Comparing pricing structure

If you want to compare AWS hosting pricing with most Swiss, Austrian or German hosting companies, you may not find many European options that can offer the same pricing structure and the same costs. Check out Exoscale's pricing and you will see that we match most of the American options when it comes to pricing. Exoscale is the most affordable and secure AWS alternatives in Europe.

Choosing the right tool for the job

Simplicity can only come from reducing options. Simplicity needs focus. But a feature that makes things a little bit more difficult in one use case can suddenly make things drastically easier in another use case.

Take Exoscale security groups for example. When all you want is a single cloud server, it seems overkill to configure and assign a security group for this. But as soon as you go cloud native and scale out to more than one server, it suddenly becomes incredibly useful to simply assign all of them to the same security group and have all firewall rules applied automatically.

This is just one example, but it shows how choosing the right tool for the job can quickly pay off.

General DigitalOcean logo Exoscale logo AWS logo
Simple & intuitive UI Green checkmark Green checkmark
API & tooling Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Simple & fair pricing Green checkmark Green checkmark
Datacenters worldwide Europe worldwide
Compute
Instance types for any purpose Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
GPU Green checkmark Green checkmark
Snapshots Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Cloud-init support Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Linux & Windows support Green checkmark Green checkmark
Live migrations Green checkmark
Storage
High I/O local SSD Green checkmark Green checkmark some instance types
Network block storage Green checkmark Green checkmark
Scalable object storage Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Networking
DNS Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
IPv6 Green checkmark Green checkmark not for VMs
Elastic IPs Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Private networking Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Load balancing service Green checkmark coming soon Green checkmark
Cluster friendly traffic pricing Green checkmark Green checkmark
Security Groups Green checkmark Green checkmark Green checkmark
Direct connectivity Green checkmark Green checkmark

Last but not least, let's talk privacy

The fact that both Amazon and DigitalOcean are U.S. based can complicate things for European users. EU data privacy laws require personal data to be stored in Europe or in countries with equal or stronger data privacy laws.

Being based in Switzerland, governed by some of the strongest data privacy laws in the world means Exoscale can be a great option to meet even the strictest data security requirements.