> their customer success team offers excellent support
Just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I did not find this to be case. I received terrible support, responses, and lack of responses from Digital Ocean to the point that I no longer use their services for anything serious.
Here's one of the issues I experienced before I pulled the plug:
I wanted to perform the simple task of creating an image from a backup and spinning it up into a server so I could have a duplicate dev server. Seemed very straightforward. Clicked a few buttons in their "dead simple" control panel.
Their timer said "57 seconds remaining" but it never finished. I tried to contact support. 3.5 hours later I received a message saying that it could take hours to complete due to them:
"zeroing out the storage space to be used in order to ensure previous data in those blocks are erased."
I was further told that the advertised timer works for their images they have already setup, but everything else they couldn't give any ETA on. So, the timer was just eye candy not really attached to anything:
"Unfortunately, this part of the process can take a while, especially for larger droplets or droplets based on backups or snapshots. Smaller droplets and those that are based on images we provide are generally faster and should finish creation within the advertised 55 seconds, as long as the system is not under high load.
It's hard to give an accurate ETA for droplets of this size since there are many variables that go into the provisioning process, but note that the process could go up to three or so hours if there's high load at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience with this."
I was attempting to recreate an image from a backup they did. It was of the smallest droplets they have available and it wasn't near capacity.
The server never did actually get setup. Instead, just falling off of my "dead simple" dashboard every time, never hitting active. I mentioned this in the support ticket I had open, since the problem was obviously not resolved. Here was the response:
"Glad to be of assistance.
We appreciate you being a Digital Ocean customer and please let us know if we can be of further assistance!"
This was the third person to respond on my ticket; a different person for every response.
I left them and never looked back. You can find similar experiences on this website or by some brief Googling.
Ultimately, DO is probably still fine to get things going or play around, but I wouldn't trust it for anything serious or anything where you would expect a timely or decent response to help you ensure you can get work done that day. I certainly wouldn't trust DO with anything even close to $250k worth of operations.