Find out all the details you need to make the right decision

Joel

Feb 4·5 min read

As technologies improve, cloud hosting has become almost essential for developers. This facility simplifies the deployment procedure for apps and programs, offering greater scalability and scope. Digital Ocean and Heroku are two of the most popular cloud hosting service providers in the world today. If you are having trouble picking one, the following comparison may help you make the best choice. Before getting down to DigitalOcean vs Heroku, you must first understand what these two are.

What is DigitalOcean?

Digital Ocean offers cloud computing technologies to businesses and developers. Through its services, companies can deploy and scale applications effortlessly. These applications can then run parallel to each other across several cloud servers without affecting each other’s performance.

Digital Ocean was named one of the largest cloud hosting companies in January 2018. The company is one of the leading cloud service providers in the United States of America. Its headquarters is located in New York City.

Features

If you pick Digital Ocean, you can take advantage of the following features that the service provider offers.

• Developers can quickly create a scalable VPS to run on their operating system of choice
• Backup and monitor your servers
• Developers can start a virtual private server with any pre-configured web app.
• Allows protection of servers with cloud firewalls.
• Manage your servers using API, CLI app, and dashboard.
• Team inclusion option available for building infrastructure together.
• Load balancers and floating IP addresses allow for effective traffic management.

Benefits

You should also understand the advantages of using the cloud hosting service provider when comparing to Heroku. Listed below are some of the ways developers benefit while working on Digital Ocean’s platform.

• Affordable pricing and the easy of use
• Sever level access and flexibility
• The user interface is simple and aesthetic at the same time. The optimal options present in the UI makes working on Digital Ocean a treat for developers.
• Digital Ocean’s performance is better than most cloud hosting companies out there. It was one of the first to use SSD-based virtual machines and IPv6, thereby leading to more convenience for developers.
• The professional and comprehensive documentation helps developers new to the platform to learn all about its utilities.

Pricing

Digital Ocean offers various options when it comes to pricing. The basic plan starts at $5 per month and limits data transfer to just 1TB. The best plan is priced at $160 per month and offers up to 7 TB of data transfer. Additionally, hourly plans are also available for individual developers.

What is Heroku?

Heroku refers to a cloud hosting platform as a service. Developers using Heroku do not need to worry about the infrastructure. Instead, they can simply perfect the development of the app, while Heroku takes care of scalability and deployment. In 2007, when Heroku was formed, the platform only supported the Ruby programming language. However, since then, it has added support for Scala, Node.js, Python, PHP, Clojure, Go and Java.

Salesforce.com acquired Heroku in 2010 for a $212 million deal. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, California. Read on to know how the platform competes with similar cloud hosting services, especially Heroku vs Digital Ocean.

Features

Heroku is a feature-rich platform. When you subscribe to the service, you can access the following features.

• Support for multiple modern programming languages, including Java, Clojure, Python, Go, Scala, PHP, and more.
• Apps operate in smart containers, known as dynos. This provides load balancing, orchestration, logging, security, and much more.
• Heroku’s platform is responsible for running some of the apps receiving the greatest amount of traffic. The easy scalability of apps ensures a one-click approach without any downtime.
• Integration and deployment occur continuously with the option to use the most popular CI servers and systems. You can deploy using GitHub, Git, or using an API.

Benefits

Apart from the features of Heroku, listed below are some of the benefits of the platform that makes it a contender for Digital Ocean vs. Heroku comparison.

• Easy and fast app deployment
• Managed hosting service that takes care of scalability
• It allows developers to shift their focus from infrastructure to coding the application itself.
• Offers a single billing system for projects broken down in the form of teams.
• Support for most Modern Open Source Languages.
• It helps you to focus on innovations instead of thinking about operations.
• Fast permissions and application management
• Impressive CLI and dashboard

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, the paid subscription starts at $7 per dyno per month. This is more suitable for personal projects. For professional usage, Heroku offers plans starting at $25 per month and ranging up to $500 per dyno per month.

DigitalOcean vs Heroku: What are the differences?

Listed below are some factors that cause the distinction between Heroku and Digital Ocean.

Difference #1: IaaS and PaaS

Digital Ocean is a cloud-based service or IaaS that offers networking, storage, and virtualization options. On the other hand, Heroku is PaaS, which refers to software and hardware tools available on the Internet.

To understand the differences between IaaS and Paas, please read the article IaaS vs Paas.

Difference #2: Manageability

Heroku offers developers more freedom to focus on optimizing their applications. It manages the infrastructure side of the job, such as maintaining servers and databases. Digital Ocean is not managed in the same way. When using this platform, you would need to concentrate on both the application development, as well as managing the backend.

Difference #3: Cost

When it comes to Digital Ocean vs Heroku, the price for their services is an important factor to consider. Since Heroku offers greater management of applications and servers, it is relatively costly, when compared to Digital Ocean. The latter leaves most of the backend management in the hands of the developers and, therefore, is cheaper.

Difference #3: Server control

Digital Ocean allows you to create a virtual private server. Even though the service provider does not manage it for you, the handy guides available can help you set up such servers yourself. Unfortunately, Heroku does not offer such an option.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, both Heroku and Digital Ocean are crucial services for developers today. While there is no clear winner in Heroku vs DigitalOcean, you need to choose based on your requirements. In general, managed solutions are better at first, while less managed solutions may be better during the end-stages of development.

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