Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…
If you want a DO competitor check out vultr.com -- I've used them for years and been quite impressed. They seem at least as good if not better and they have some very interesting features like turn-key BGP and AnyCast hosting. I have no affiliation with them.
With near-zero traffic on my interface - and for an internally facing VM, the IP address of which has never been published in any DNS, their DDoS 'protection' system decided I was under DDoS attack and blackholed my IP with their upstreams. I investigated and my conclusion is that the most likely cause was that their system mis-idenfied the overlay networking software I was using (which communicates over UDP) as DDoS traffic.
I raised this issue with support, who did not manage to help. Amongst other things, they told me that they didn't retain logs long enough to be helpful. I agreed that I would raise the issue with them again should it re-occur.
The second time they blackholed my IP, they didn't even bother telling me. And when I filed a support ticket, they took somewhere around an hour to even respond - during the time they've taken my system offline, I expect them to make themselves available.
When I tried calling their parent company on the phone, they were downright rude with me. I understand they don't usually do phone support, and that's fine, but if you've told me that (A) you can only help me resolve a problem during an incident because you don't keep logs, and (B) don't make yourself available to me through your regular support channels, don't get pissy with me for phoning you. And especially don't completely refuse to do anything remotely helpful.
I ended up terminating the VM and moving that workload elsewhere. I don't have time to be fixing other people's networks, especially when they can't be bothered to participate in the process.
It's a shame, because their BGP & AnyCast stuff looked really interesting, and I'd love to explore their offerings more. But I don't currently have confidence I can deploy anything with them in production, because when something goes wrong with their service, they don't appear competent at making themselves available to fix things.
(For the record, in some respects I consider one of my companies to be a competitor to both Digital Ocean & Vultr. But I like to be familiar with the competition, so I use them for some things. It also provides us a way to put workloads in locations we wouldn't otherwise be able to justify.)