What's good about...

Alibaba Cloud logo 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

Alibaba Cloud logo 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 $0.01 / GB

Alibaba Cloud offers GPUs in the following configurations:

Name GPUs VRAM vCPUs RAM Price/h
ecs.gn6i-c4g1.xlarge 1x T4 16GB 4 15GB $1.18
ecs.gn7i-c8g1.2xlarge 1x A10 24GB 8 30GB $2.86
ecs.gn6e-c12g1.3xlarge 1x V100 32GB 12 92GB $3.51

DigitalOcean offers GPUs in the following configurations:

Name GPUs VRAM vCPUs RAM Price/h
Nvidia H100 SXM 1x H100 80GB 20 240GB $3.39 Launch
Nvidia H100 SXM 8x H100 640GB 160 1920GB $23.92 Launch

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
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

Alternatives to consider

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Our data for Alibaba Cloud was last updated on Oct. 14, 2024, and for DigitalOcean on Oct. 2, 2024.