DigitalOcean vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Google Cloud Spanner
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Spanner is a cloud database-as-a-service product offered as a service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).N/A
Pricing
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Features
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Google Cloud Spanner
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
-
Ratings
Google Cloud Spanner
7.8
Ratings
10% below category average
Automatic software patching00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Database scalability00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Automated backups00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Database security provisions00 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Automatic host deployment00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanGoogle Cloud Spanner
Likelihood to Recommend
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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If you have a large relational database and it is growing fast on daily basis, and if you have a strong need in ACID across all your clusters, and most importantly, if you need to maintain high availability in a large region, Google Cloud Spanner can be a very good choice.
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Pros
  • Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
  • Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
  • Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
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  • Super high availability
  • Scales automatically
  • High standard SLA
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Cons
  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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  • Support for Views
  • Support for more databases (schemas).
  • More index types that can be supported (Functional)
  • Backups (ie table/data backup) if data is deleted or truncate by accident.
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Likelihood to Renew
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
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Usability
With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.
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No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.
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Spanner scales quickly compared to Amazon RDS. Azure Database is about the same as well. MongoDB can scale to horizontal scalability, however, because Mongo doesn't support full ACID, Spanner comes into that aspect. GCP Cloud SQL not as scalable as Spanner. Spanner has more functionality than MongoDB and Amazon RDS & Azure Databases.
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Scalability
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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Return on Investment
  • DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
  • DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
  • We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
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  • Backups specifically if transactional data is deleted. Restoring made us lose time.
  • Sharding on Horizontal level was quick and easy. Deployment and increasing nodes is easy
  • Large dataset handling.
  • ACID compliance
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ScreenShots