Let's take the popular droplet plan offered by Digital ocean and compare it with the equivalent EC2 instance.
Month Cost Hourly 0.03 x 720 = $21.6. So they offer $20/month if you are ready to pay upfront. That makes it yearly.
$20 x 12 = $240
With the on-demand instance, you can stop or terminate the instance and Amazon will discontinue charging you the hourly fees.
With the No-Upfront Reserved Instance, you commit to paying the hourly instance charge for every hour of the month for 12 months, whether or not you are actually running a matching instance.
Because you promise to pay for the whole year, Amazon gives you a discount on the fees for that year.
So immediately convert your on-demand EC2 instances to no-upfront if you run it full time.
Let's see how the EC2 prices compare against droplet of the same capacity.
| Reserved instance | Yearly cost | Droplet Diff |
|---|---|---|
| No upfront | 0 + 20.95 x 12 = $251.4 | + $11.4/yr |
| Partial upfront | 120 + 10 x 12 = $240 | + $0/yr |
| Full upfront | 235 + 0 x 12 = $235 | - $5/yr |
If you take the monthly plan of droplet 4GB server, you get an advantage of $20.95 - $20 = $0.95/month.
$11.4/year isnt much considering the services AWS offers.
Besides, if you consider the long-running, dependable server for a year, which you prefer to pay for the full year, AWS seems to be a better option with a cost advantage of $5/yr.
An advantage of saving $11.4 over a year doesn't seem worthwhile to move to Digital Ocean with your EC2 instances.