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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#21

Post by mwcampbell »

I've played with DigitalOcean some. But I've kept my main VPS on Linode, and also recently recommended Linode for a group that I'm peripherally involved with.

Using SSDs for multi-tenant virtualized servers seems like a good idea to me. My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about.

However, I have the following reservations about DigitalOcean:

1. No IPv6 yet AFAIK. I figured that would be a priority given the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, particularly in Amsterdam.

2. Not all resource allocations are proportional to the price or amount of RAM. On Linode, a 4 GB VPS is 4 times as much as a 1 GB VPS in every way. On DigitalOcean, a 2 GB VPS only has 2x as much CPU, 2x as much storage, and 3x as much bandwidth as a 512 MB VPS. Don't get me wrong; the prices are great. It just doesn't seem like a logical way to allocate resources from a pool.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#22

Post by kawsper »

I tried to make the switch, but found the network to be too unstable.

I have several servers on Linode, that communicates over the internal network (PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, Beanstalk etc.) and a bunch of app-servers. If their line of communication is broken, nothing works.

Now I only use my server at DigitalOcean as routing traffic when I am travelling.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#23

Post by Vieira »

isalmon wrote: post #12
jtchang wrote: post #10

I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment. How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity. I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure. EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.

I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.

Support is quick to reply but often there is nothing they can do. I've tried contacting regarding both technical problems and billing issues and in both occasions they couldn't do nothing to help.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#24

Post by bifrost »

isalmon wrote: post #12
jtchang wrote: post #10

I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment. How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity. I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure. EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.

I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.

Wait, you lose connectivity or the VM goes down? They're very different things...

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#25

Post by sondh »

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#26

Post by dergachev »

What's even more exciting is that there's a Vagrant provider for DigitalOcean! I tried it yesterday and it seems to actually work: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean

Basically you put your DO api key in your Vagrant file, and then running "vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean" spins up a new ubuntu VM and runs your chef/puppet provisioner code on them. It's awesome!

It uses rsync to mirror your vagrant project directory to /vagrant, which is a actually better workflow for some use cases (eg hosting) than virtualbox shared folders.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#28

Post by dubfan »

akkartik wrote: post #20
dreen wrote: post #17

Im not convinced meteoric is the best term for growth. Meteors usually fall down (relative to Earth)

The Greek root actually means 'lofty'. I love etymology: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm

Hence why the term "meteorology" refers to the study of the weather than the study of meteors.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#30

Post by masonhensley »

dergachev wrote: post #27

Does anybody know if they offer anything equivalent to HOSTNAME.herokuapp.com? I'm just testing them now, and I'm not ready to point a real domain at them yet.

Do you not have a domain of any sort? It would seem trivial to point TESTAPP.degachevdomain.com to the IP address of the server. Else, just go to the IP.
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