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Alibaba Cloud vs DigitalOcean

In this page:

What's good
Price comparison
What services do they offer
Company details
Alternatives to consider

What's good about...

Alibaba Cloud

Strong presence in Asia and over 3,000 points of presence (POPs) around the world
Extensive range of managed services and server configurations
Offers a solid range of GPU servers

DigitalOcean

Wide range of managed services: from databases to serverless to Kubernetes
Many VPS configurations available (GPUs, high memory, dedicated CPU)
Plenty of datacenter locations around the world
There's lots of guides, docs and community tutorials online

Price comparison

How do Alibaba Cloud's prices compare against DigitalOcean?

Example configuration	Alibaba Cloud	DigitalOcean
VM Small	$15.21 / mo 1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM (ecs.xn4.small)	$6.00 / mo 1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM (Basic)
VM Medium	$89.79 / mo 4 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM (ecs.c7.xlarge)	$48.00 / mo 4 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM (Basic)
VM Large	$170.49 / mo 8 vCPU, 16 GiB RAM (ecs.c7.2xlarge)	$168.00 / mo 8 vCPU, 16 GiB RAM (CPU-Optimized)
Block Storage	$11.20 / mo 100 GB (Enhanced SSD PL0)	$10.00 / mo 100 GB
Object Storage	$43.84 / mo 1 TB, 250 GB reads, 100 GB writes	$20.00 / mo 1 TiB
Load Balancer	$16.56 / mo Small I (slb.s1.small)	$12.00 / mo
Managed PostgreSQL	$114.92 / mo 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM (general-purpose)	$60.00 / mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB storage
Managed Redis®*	$43.09 / mo 1 GB Performance-enhanced (HA)	$15.00 / mo 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
Serverless 25M Executions	--	$34.69 / mo 25M invocations, 512 MB RAM, 150 ms duration
Free egress allowance	10 GB / mo	100 GB - 10 TB / mo per instance
1 TB of egress beyond allowance	$74.00 $0.074 / GB	$10.00

Note: Our pricing examples are based on several assumptions. Your actual costs may differ. Always check the cloud provider's website for the most up-to-date pricing.

Which services do they offer?

Here are some of the managed services that Alibaba Cloud and DigitalOcean offer:

Service	Alibaba Cloud	DigitalOcean
Block Storage
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Container Registry
GPU-powered Servers
Load Balancer
Managed Containers
Managed Kubernetes
Managed MySQL
Managed PostgreSQL
Managed Redis®*
Object Storage
Serverless Cron Jobs
Serverless Functions
Static Sites
Virtual Private Server (VPS)	--

Company details

	Alibaba Cloud	DigitalOcean
Website	www.alibabacloud.com	digitalocean.com
Headquarters	Singapore 🇸🇬	United States of America 🇺🇸
Founded	2009	2011
Data Center Locations	30	14
Example Customers	Taobao, Henkel, Hang Seng Bank, Tiger Brokers	Crisp, ScraperAPI, GHost, and CTO.ai

	Alibaba Cloud
Website	www.alibabacloud.com
Headquarters	Singapore 🇸🇬
Founded	2009
Data Center Locations	30
Example Customers	Taobao, Henkel, Hang Seng Bank, Tiger Brokers

	DigitalOcean
Website	digitalocean.com
Headquarters	United States of America 🇺🇸
Founded	2011
Data Center Locations	14
Example Customers	Crisp, ScraperAPI, GHost, and CTO.ai