How DigitalOcean’s support plans compare to AWS Support for small- to medium-businesses

There are four paid Amazon Web Services Support plans above the Basic Support Plan, which start at the “Developer” plan and go up to the “Enterprise” plan. The way AWS charges for support is based on a minimum payment or a percentage of the customer’s bill, whichever is higher. This means that as your usage on AWS increases, your support cost will also increase, even if you are submitting the same number of inquiries to support.

There are additional fees for access to AWS Managed Services, which “offer guidance and execution of operational best practices with specialized automations, skills, and experience that are contextual to your environment and applications.”

The AWS Support Plans offerings differ by level, and we recommend evaluating the full offerings before making a decision. However, each plan offers different response times for general guidance, system impaired issues, production system impaired issues, and system down issues. Some plans offer 24/7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via web, phone, and chat, while others only offer business hours support. Access to architecture guidance also varies by AWS Support Plan.

Cost is a major downside of AWS support. The Developer Plan starts at $29/month or 3% of your cloud bill, while the Business Plan (the minimum recommended for business applications) costs the greater of $100/month or 10% of your first $10,000 in spend, 7% of spend between $10,000 and $80,000, and a lower incremental amount of the rest of your cloud spend. So, a business spending $20,000 a month who wanted to be on the Business Plan would spend $1,700/month for AWS Support. Because the AWS Support pricing model is often based on a percentage of the user’s bill, it can be unpredictable how much customers will be charged each month, making it difficult for businesses to accurately plan their spend.

The highest level of AWS Support Plan costs at least $15,000 a month and is geared towards enterprise organizations—while AWS does support organizations that are smaller through their other tiers, the spend-based-pricing can be out of reach for many smaller businesses, and can quickly balloon.

As with other AWS offerings, their support model is also quite complex - not only do different tiers offer different levels of support, AWS also has different response times depending on the type of incident, with their fastest response time per tier being reserved for production systems that are fully down.

In addition to cost, some small businesses report having a difficult time even getting in touch with AWS Support when they were using AWS services. Because the free level of support doesn’t provide access to Cloud Support Engineers, businesses have to pay even to get basic questions answered. On the lowest Developer Plan tier, responses are limited to business hours, so customers will have to pay at least $100 (or higher based on their cloud spend) to get responses in a more timely fashion and on weekends.

“We tried reaching out to AWS’ support for some issues with reliability and they said we didn’t pay enough even to just submit a ticket, which was very frustrating.” - Validin

To contact support for Amazon Web Services, you can access this page. As noted above, to submit a technical support ticket you will need to have a paid AWS Support plan. DigitalOcean provides all users with free, human support and has paid plans with flat pricing for faster response times, business and architecture guidance, and more.

DigitalOcean’s Support Plans differentiate themselves from AWS Support Plans by offering human support at all tiers, including the free tier, and personalized, technical support starting at the Standard Plan for $100/month. The Standard plan includes fast response times of under 2 hours, while AWS’ Business Support Plan provides general guidance in 24 hours, system impaired guidance in 12 hours, and production system impaired guidance in 4 hours. DigitalOcean’s simple response time model means customers won’t be questioning how quickly they will get a response based on their incident type, and DigitalOcean provides 24/7 support even for those on the free Starter Tier.

DigitalOcean’s Premium Support is priced at $1000/month, compared to AWS’ pricing of at least $5,500 a month for their “Enterprise On-Ramp” level support. DigitalOcean Premium Support provides responses within 30 minutes, access to technical support via Slack, and dedicated business advisors who will review customers’ architecture, help with migrations and upcoming product launches, and more.

With Premium Support, customers get access to multiple support engineers to troubleshoot any issues that arise. This access to these dedicated and smart cloud support engineers can be extremely valuable for growing businesses, as these engineers can provide architectural and operational guidance in addition to escalation paths for support issues. The business support and reviews provided by these DigitalOcean experts is a unique benefit not offered by the majority of cloud providers.

Here is a comparison of DigitalOcean and AWS support offerings, looking at two common packages.

Data pulled from the AWS website, accurate as of June 2023

DigitalOcean customers can search extensive help articles and community Q&As through the main support portal. To contact support and submit a ticket for review by cloud support associates, customers can visit the support page while logged into their account. For faster response times and dedicated technical support engineers, sign up for one of DigitalOcean’s paid support offerings.