AWS vs DigitalOcean: Cloud Hosting Comparison (2026)

The case for

• An India billing address puts your agreement with Amazon Web Services India Private Limited, so the invoice total is in rupees with PAN and GST fields.
• New accounts get 100 dollars in credits immediately and can earn up to 100 more, with over 90 services open on the free plan.
• More than 30 services stay free within monthly usage limits on both the free and paid plans, not only during a trial window.

The catch

• The free account closes on its own six months after you open it or when the credits run out, whichever comes first.
• Basic support answers no technical questions, and the cheapest paid tier costs the greater of 29 dollars a month per account or 9 percent of your AWS charges.
• Support fees are worked out on gross monthly charges before any discounts or credits, so a discounted bill still carries the full percentage.
• Enterprise Support starts at the greater of 5,000 dollars a month or 10 percent of charges, which puts fast response times out of reach for most startups.

The case for

• Droplets start at $4 per month with per-second billing and a 60-second minimum, so short-lived test boxes cost close to nothing.
• There is a Bangalore region with the slug blr1, so Indian traffic does not have to route through Singapore for low latency.
• Every droplet includes at least 500 GiB of outbound transfer and overage runs $0.01 per GiB, well under the large hyperscalers.

The catch

• Billing is USD only and DigitalOcean will not issue invoices in any other currency, so every month carries forex and card charges.
• Indian customers are charged 18 percent GST unless a valid GSTIN is added to the team, and then reverse charge becomes your obligation.
• Automated backups add 20 percent of droplet cost for weekly and 30 percent for daily, so backups are a line item and not a checkbox.
• Powered-off droplets keep billing because the resources stay reserved, which is the most common source of a surprise invoice.