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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#81

Post by pixeloution »

mgkimsal wrote: post #68
mikeash wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill. Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.

heaven help you if you manage to start an instance that has n permanent storage then reboot it. apparently that's the default, and you need to (imo) go out of your way to get permanent storage. I understand the use case for the former, but the UI and docs for the latter use case were, last I looked, pretty difficult to grok. Yeah, AWS has some functionality/scaling features that DO and Linode don't , but it's a small…

Its a bit deep to understand at first, but once you've been on the platform for a while, its pretty straightforward. I'm going to respectfully disagree with the "smaller set than people initially assume" -- there are huge differences.

Some examples:

* DNS can be set up to round robin * auto-scaling can be built in * load balancers are available and easy to use * For companies with multiple employees various levels of access can be granted to the system via IAM roles * you can add and subtract hard drives from an instance on the fly (EBS volumes) * You can set those volumes up as RAID if you so desire. * You can easily move IP addresses from one instance to another.

These are just the ones off the top of my head as I've been off AWS for about 6 months now. This doesn't even count how well the servers play with other amazon web services, like SQS, SNS, SES and RDS (queue, notifications, email, database).

That being said, I use DO for a few small sites I host because I don't need any of the features AWS provides.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#82

Post by mattmanser »

unethical_ban wrote: post #28

Seems no one here so far has mentioned Rackspace. Let's start by saying that DO has fewer features for a complex deployment: No load balancing, no private subnets, (IIRC) no IPv6 at the moment. No "cloud files" or S3 equivalent, the scaling isn't as automatic as RAX or AWS can provide. DO can't host Windows (which still matters for many existing operations, don't fool yourself). RAX gives more information and granula…

Every time I look at rack space it looks phenomenally expensive.

As far as I can tell it's 5 times the cost of digital ocean.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#83

Post by freehunter »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #62
nathancahill wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were having SERIOUS issues a few months ago. I had been scaling up to around $600/month in droplets, and almost canceled and walked away. The IO was horrible, packet loss was massive and droplets were crashing all the time. Fortunately, they've gotten much better again and I haven't had a single issue in 3 months. I think they got really popular suddenly and couldn't handle the explosive growth.

I created a droplet that I was going to use for the production site. It is currently sitting in a totally crashed state. I have no idea when it crashed, or why, I just know it happened some time in the past month. I am now nervous about moving to them.

Any server you have running in any kind of environment where reliability is a factor should have some kind of monitoring system. Maybe DO should offer this feature like others do, but it's not out of the question to have another droplet running a heartbeat monitor. That'd be akin to them charging another $5/mo for the same service.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#84

Post by eli »

mberning wrote: post #59
eli wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's saying your personal experience is wrong, just your extrapolation to "this is a pump & dump scheme"

That their support organization does not care about actually supporting the product is very telling to me. Especially when you have somebody willing to spend $160/mo or more and you basically tell them to 'go away'.

That's definitely a negative and I appreciate you sharing the anecdote, but it's still an awfully big leap from one bad support experience to criminal enterprise.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#85

Post by threeseed »

dharma1 wrote: post #56
crazygringo wrote: post #11

To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…

competitive advantage compared to Linode - SSD drives, cheaper. That's it. Start process on Linode is just as easy and docs are as good or better, DNS support is there etc.

Linode has a long history of major security incidents and withholding information from their customers.

So unless your data is worthless then Linode is a terrible choice.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#86

Post by threeseed »

zubi wrote: post #79
MicroBerto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. For me it was price and performance, both of which DigitalOcean wins. I couldn't possibly care less about an admin panel. I'm a Linux guy. I want cheap speed and reliability. With DO, you get all of them. Sorry Linode, but you're old news now.

I share exactly the same feelings and experience with the person who replied to your comment previously. I have a server in each and I like them both. However; - Linode support is second to none. DO is not bad either but much slower and less responsive. You feel the difference when you really need it. - I had a CC payment issue with DO since the beginning. I mentioned it to the support twice but unsolved as of yet, u…

Why would you choose Linode for a serious/critical project ?

Do you not know about their major security incidents ?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#87

Post by eli »

digitalsushi wrote: post #54

I'm trying to find a VPS provider that can do IPv6 and multiple IPv4. Digital Ocean really surprised me in having no IPv6 offering. What really surprised me is that you can't get IPv6 on Amazon's EC2. You can get a v6 address for a load balancer, but that's surely not the same thing. Linode does actually almost fit the bill, except that they require manual authorization for an additional IPv4 addresses. So there's no…

Dumb question: what do you use IPv6 for? What am I missing by not having it?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#88

Post by jcampbell1 »

freehunter wrote: post #83
jcampbell1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created a droplet that I was going to use for the production site. It is currently sitting in a totally crashed state. I have no idea when it crashed, or why, I just know it happened some time in the past month. I am now nervous about moving to them.

Any server you have running in any kind of environment where reliability is a factor should have some kind of monitoring system. Maybe DO should offer this feature like others do, but it's not out of the question to have another droplet running a heartbeat monitor. That'd be akin to them charging another $5/mo for the same service.

I would of course do that before I migrated. I did have munin running, but without alerts. The problem is that is crashed at all. My production server has been up for 668 days, and the temporary DO server didn't last 30.

On the production server, I do ping the server every five minutes, but the customer complaints always reach me before that system.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#89

Post by jdlshore »

davexunit wrote: post #46

I currently use digitalocean for my blog, but I was recently pointed towards this article which concerns me greatly: https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean... If I cannot have freedom of speech on my blog, I will have to find a new provider that respects my freedom.

Nearly Free Speech (nearlyfreespeech.net) is a great choice for hosting a blog. I've been using them for ages. Fees are based on actual usage (network traffic, CPU, storage, etc.) and they take legal rights seriously.

Only downside is that they're a bit limited in what kinds of platforms they support.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#90

Post by adventured »

ridruejo wrote: post #38
eli wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and AWS is great but it's also not magic. It's unlikely you can literally just take the code that was running on a micro instance and scale it up to a big site in multiple zones without a lot of work.

I completely agree, you would have to re-architect the whole app! I am just saying that it gives you the option to because it provides the services and scale to do so. Digital Ocean is great for $5 dev servers, but it is lacking (at least for now) the rest of services and functionality and scale that makes AWS great.

DigitalOcean is cheap enough to be really great as a stand-alone offering period. That includes their $80 or $160 type plans. They're definitely not just great for $5 dev servers.
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