Magento Commerce Cloud vs Digital Ocean Performance and Price
Let’s compare Magento 2 Cloud hosting with Digital Ocean (later DO).
I will compare the basic Magento cloud PRO plan. Magento Pro Core 12
Magento has redundant architecture 3 servers per 4 vCPU 3 x 4 =12 vCpus total without horizontal scaling. However redundant architecture can achieve higher reliability vs single server architecture 99.9 vs 99.8 but you will have huge network latency overhead betting servers.
Network latency is the main problem of Magento performance. The fastest Magento 2 installation is when everything installed on a single machine and doesn't have any external network calls. But you can easily turn on AZ in future manuals if the client needs it. I have spent a lot of time to debug why Magento 2 Cloud is slow, but in another AWS environment, it was faster. I have found Magento Cloud has Redis/MYSQL/ELASTIC SEARCH/NFS in different AZ. And it is produced a performance bottleneck.
Redis had a network latency of 0.9 ms in one subnet latency is AZ — 0.13 if it is installed locally using sockets it is 0.01. Magento 2 has a lot of cache calls per page to Redis. The same applies to any services communicated by network.
Also, I found that Redis installed on the Magento cloud has bigger latency 0.33 (iff ping from the same instance) vs 0.12 R5.large stand alone Redis.
The price of the Magento Cloud is around 1500–2500$ months for 12vCPU and price service not from resources needed to run your site slow but from the merchant's revenue. If you are a successful eCommerce business it is an expansive idea to host on Magento cloud which is not basically “Magento” it is resale service from Platform.SH under the Magento brand. You can buy the same services as the original company
Digital Ocean has a price 320$ for the bigger 16 vCPU computed optimized instance. You can also find cheaper Standart droplets however I’m recommending to use the fastest CPU possible. Because of the bad design, Magento is CPU hangry and for regular production websites on fas server it takes 1000ms CPU time to render the single page and if the server is not the fastest (Some cheap VPS) this time can be 2000ms
Price per 12 vCPU standard droplet is 240$
With Digital Ocean you could also puy additional MySQL server or add Elastic search server to scale you application. With Magento cloud, you couldn't do that you are Slave of the system and you need to buy a more expansive server.
As we can see for the Magento cloud 12vCPU hosing we can buy the biggest and the fastest Digital Ocean server 64GB 32v CPUs $640 4 times. However, with Magento, you will have a personal Sucess manager, and once in a year on Christmas, you will receive a gift from the company. But code is a code it needs computed resources (more transistors) not a toys.
