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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#81

Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?

I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says:

                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
    Mem:        503516     488644      14872          0       9036     203300
    -/+ buffers/cache:     276308     227208
    Swap:      1048572     153704     894868
Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd recommend adding a swapfile so you don't run out of memory at some point - since they're using SSDs, swapping is not that bad.)

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#82
post #73

Could you publish non-anonymized SSD reliability data? When Google did publish their extensive HDD reliability study they removed all brand/model names, so it's pretty useless for consumers.

I suspect such data wouldn't be that useful even if it included model names because by the time you have good data on a model it's old enough that it's no longer price competitive.

Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Netflix is already deploying the brand new Crucial m500, although their monkeys probably care more about cost than reliability.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#84
post #56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?

Mine is in New York. Pingdom is configured to 1 minute resolution and I had 54 minutes of downtime in the last 30 days. Maybe I need to take a snapshot and spin up another instance. Thanks for your reference point.

No problem. I've been quite happy with them so far. I was using BuyVM for my side projects, but was getting annoyed with dealing with constant downtime, and other issues. I was starting to consider Linode, but ended up going with DigitalOcean due to the price. I really hope they can keep up the reliability that I've been experiencing.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#85
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the trick is (as it is with most vps providers), that most users, don't always use full memory and or full CPU usage, or even disk space. The full usage, if it ever happens usually happens in small bursts. Most vps providers have a rule that you are not alowed to use 100% 24/7/365 or they can cancel your account (I don't know if this is true with DO). The trick is that if you have a lot of customers you can s…

What you are describing is overselling , and I am under the impression that overselling is less possible with KVM, what DigitalOcean uses.

I don't think "overselling" is the right word in this, it implies degradation of performance because of too many VMs. My understanding, is that all VMs allow sharing resources, even KVM. But to my understanding, you can share memory on KVM, but not diskspace (at least not easily), which is why every single KVM offers out there have very small disk allocation. This works great for DO, because they are offering SSD, and SSD VPS (regardless the type of VM) are small in size, so it fits perfectly.

I think the whole idea with VPS, is that you can share resources, so there is nothing wrong with that, its the overselling part that should be of concern and I have no reason to believe that DO is overselling. Their performance is pretty good.

The point I was trying to make referring to the OP, that VPS like DO can be profitable even at such a low price, because of the way VPS work. Even with very small revenue, if you have enough customer you can make good money. That's why the math works. Most other KVM offerings are so expensive because they don't have that tipping point scale to make them profitable with the same price. But other hosts like Linode gets away with charging more, because of reputation. They already have a good thing going, unless they starts losing customers drastically, they don't have to change their pricing model.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#86
post #82
post #73

Could you publish non-anonymized SSD reliability data? When Google did publish their extensive HDD reliability study they removed all brand/model names, so it's pretty useless for consumers.

I suspect such data wouldn't be that useful even if it included model names because by the time you have good data on a model it's old enough that it's no longer price competitive. Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Netflix is already deploying the brand new Crucial m500, although their monkeys probably care more about cost than reliability.

Sure, information on particular models is pretty useless, but dredging the data might turn up model series that tend to outperform other series/other brands.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#87
post #81

Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?

I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 503516 488644 14872 0 9036 203300 -/+ buffers/cache: 276308 227208 Swap: 1048572 153704 894868 Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd rec…

Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#89
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 503516 488644 14872 0 9036 203300 -/+ buffers/cache: 276308 227208 Swap: 1048572 153704 894868 Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd rec…

Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?

GitLab is using puma (configured to 1 worker/8 threads in my case), and I'm running nginx in front of it. Sidekiq seems to be eating the biggest chunk of my memory (~20%), so I might be able to save some memory by tuning that.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#90
post #36

I am curious if there are any IOPS comparisons between DigitalOcean and real hardware (spinning disks)? Currently we run our Postgres instances on EC2, but are looking to move to get better IOPS. The question is: SSD-based VMs or real hardware? Cost is also a factor which is why DigitalOcean is a contender.

Check these out: http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-perf... http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121

Thanks but those are not what I am looking for. Linode and AWS run on VMs just like DO. The question is not SSD VM vs disk VM. It is SSD VM vs disk non-VM (real hardware).
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