DigitalOcean vs. Exoscale vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Datacenter bunker under a mountain picto

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
Simple & intuitive UI
API & tooling
Simple & fair pricing
Datacenters	worldwide	Europe	worldwide

Compute
Instance types for any purpose
GPU
Snapshots
Cloud-init support
Linux & Windows support
Live migrations

Storage
High I/O local SSD			some instance types
Network block storage
Scalable object storage

Networking
DNS
IPv6		not for VMs
Elastic IPs
Private networking
Load balancing service	coming soon
Cluster friendly traffic pricing
Security Groups
Direct connectivity

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.

A cloud native future

We believe the applications of the future will be cloud native. This is why we strive to build the best cloud for developer teams that already build cloud native applications in Europe today.

Compare DigitalOcean, Exoscale and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to see how to make the most of your infrastructure budget.