Hacker News Reader

A $5 instance on DO has significantly more resources than on the equivalent cost box on EC2

https://uncrunched.com/2013/08/07/digital-ocean-v-aws-10x-pe... for an old comparison.

EC2 is, and always have been slow and expensive. its the other bits that make it compelling.

Not sure about that, as others have mentioned. At 2M monthly active users, bandwidth alone would be way more than $5 on GCE/AWS, no? How much bandwidth did you use?

That's a bit surprising, can you expand on the difference in price between the $5 droplet and GCE? Is it other costs not included in the monthly base?

DO is more expensive with their higher end VPS. GCE is cheaper if you don't use a lot of bandwidth

Just out of curiosity what was your technology stack ? You can't run a rails app with so many users on a $5 instance :)

It was Nginx + Golang + Cloudflare + Mongo, i managed to have so little resource usage because most of the request were served from CF edge nodes.

Did the CF edge nodes serve only static resources? Or also cached API calls somehow?

most of the traffic was map tiles, the golang part did a mongo query to get some data but that was a minor part of the traffic