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DigitalOcean lost our server

murze.be

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Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#21

Post by seanwilson »

What if you need to scale up to more servers? What if your server gets hacked and you have to recreate it? What if you accidentally delete the server or perform an upgrade that completely breaks it?

None of these would be an issue if you've scripted server recreation from scratch and permanent data is stored in high availability shared databases and services like S3. If you're relying on weekly backups to save your server state and customer data you're just asking for trouble. I like that Heroku recreates your server once a day to force you to do this properly.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#22

Post by z3t4 »

I don't know how to write this without upsetting quite a lot of people, but RAID!???!

I run Redundant disk controllers and hard drives on ZFS. And it's cheaper than a decent RAID system.

First thing I do with a new server is disabling RAID.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#23

Post by cannonball »

Not surprising. DO is an epic scam. Their systems were designed by incompetent engineers and the CEO and his brother are both Coke heads. I can't even begin to tell you how many single points of failure there are in their platform.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#26

Post by chrismartin »

Probably due to optimization of the conversion funnel, it's VERY easy to build things on DigitalOcean without understanding that - unlike many other *-as-a-service - droplets do not include backups and that is your responsibility. As a sysadmin, this is fine since I don't trust a single provider for both prod and backups anyhow, but I fear for those who are just getting started and don't realize this.

I agree that DO handled this situation appropriately, but they should warn people a little more deliberately when they sign up and create a droplet. A checkbox along the lines of "I, user, understand that I'm responsible for backing up my server", with a few links to some how-to articles of the excellent quality that DO is known for, would suffice and empower without reducing the conversion rate.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#27

Post by helper »

z3t4 wrote: post #22

I don't know how to write this without upsetting quite a lot of people, but RAID!???! I run Redundant disk controllers and hard drives on ZFS. And it's cheaper than a decent RAID system. First thing I do with a new server is disabling RAID.

How many servers? 1, 100, 1000,10,000? Where are you hosting them, in your home or in a datacenter? How much are you paying for bandwidth and power? What SLAs do you have in place for network and power? How much do you pay for your remote hands?

I hope you see what I'm getting at. While I love ZFS and think self-hosting can make a lot of economic sense, without knowing all the variables you can't really make a fair comparison.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#28

Post by limeyy »

cannonball wrote: post #23

Not surprising. DO is an epic scam. Their systems were designed by incompetent engineers and the CEO and his brother are both Coke heads. I can't even begin to tell you how many single points of failure there are in their platform.

And crappy documentation, too.
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