There is even a default 'task limit' they enforce which we had to increase by sending an email request.
Typically though, as in the article above, it's the database service scaling that causes big shocks.
Rule of thumb would be to always ask if there is an upper bound to every cloud service one uses.
But to answer your question (about AWS EC2 vs a DO droplet?), about other costs, you still have data transfer costs, which is currently:
AWS (for US East: Ohio):
Inbound: - first GB free - then $0.09/GB after (until 10TB, then you go to the next tier, paying a little less per GB.
Outbound - Well, I couldn't figure it out. The page was too complicated for me! (I think it's $0.01/GB? From this text: "Data transferred “in” to and “out” from public or Elastic IPv4 address is charged at $0.01/GB in each direction")
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Data_Transfer
DO: Inbound - free
Outbound Free tier: depends on which droplet and how long you keep the droplet powered on for, but for the cheapest $5/month powered on all month, you get 1TB free. After free tier: $0.01/GB
Source for Inbound: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/billing/bandwidth/ Source for outbound calculator: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/bandwidth/
Anyone who understands it better than me (especially the AWS pricing), please feel free to comment, I'd genuinely be interested to understand it better; with the way it's documented, I don't really understand it very well.
The way AWS complicates their pricing to the point where it's hard to tell what you're on the hook for just comes across as so... shady to me. I understand what they offer, and which problems they solve, I just don't personally like doing business with entities like AWS.
No, I'm not building anything that really needs the scale of AWS, and yeah I guess that invalidates my opinion of it to a certain extent. I'm just a stranger throwing their voice into the void for fun and to learn new things :P
Compare this to Hetzner where it costs EUR 1/TB and many server types include unlimited traffic at 1 Gbit/s.
I think the $0.01/GB you cited is region internal traffic which was sent through public IPs instead of private IPs.
it's true that outbound traffic does cost (and in theory if you do a lot of traffic), but the budget instances don't have that much bandwidth to start with. Also if you have a huge amount of traffic depending on what you do you might be better off with S3+cloudfront
