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DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

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Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#91

Post by brianwawok »

vruiz wrote: post #86
brianwawok wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is up to the client. But all of the clients (browsers) out there do more or less the same thing.. they try the first DNS record.. if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second, and so on - going down the list. TTL does not matter here because I am not yanking or adding to my DNS record. I am simply saying "Here are 3 servers.. try them in order until you find one that works". In practice, a helpful feature is a) M…

I'm not sure all clients will behave as you are experiencing. But in any case: > if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second That is not HA. Most people will not wait 30 seconds for a page to load. If your business looses money with every minute of downtime this is certainly not adequate. It's certainly not recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS#Drawbacks

Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year?

How about services you use a lot. How many hours has hacker News been down in 2015 (yet you are still on it right now)? How many hours has netflix been down in 2015? How many hours has entire chunks of AWS been down in 2015?

Every business is a spectrum. A HFT trading shop may decide that 1 second downtime per day is their max outage. A webpage advertising a pet adoption event may decide that 6 hours of downtime per day is the most they can tolerate. You have to make this decision for each product, and even better -each part of each product.

The entire point of this post thread was the idea behind "I can not use DO for serious stuff until they implement load balancing"... which is silly for most businesses. And even those businesses that need high uptime, I offered (and still believe) that DNS round robin is a decent way to get HA for almost no money.

You link to an article about it, but miss the boat. What other solution can I implement in a few minutes to provide available load balancing between any two servers in the world (same or different host provider, same or different datacenter, same or different continent).

Sometimes the relatively simple solution is "good enough". Sure you can find a wikipedia page saying where it is not perfect. I would not DNS round robin a HFT trading app. I have no problems on it for 99.99% of the web though. So much of the web has NO failover of any kind, stupid simple DNS round robin would be a vast improvement for most websites.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#92

Post by chrismarlow9 »

jdoss wrote: post #88
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #78

I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running. I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way the…

Who do you use for a dedicated provider?

joesdatacenter.com

I do not work for joes or have any affiliation. It's a very "non-automated" setup. You file a ticket with a rep to get new servers and describe what you want (I need 5 more servers just like X), no forms online to automate it or any of that. The plus side of that is you never get a canned response or ignored. Very quick and professional.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#93

Post by ohashi »

bluedino wrote: post #82
petercooper wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you're wrong but I disagree from my own POV. It's a common play in the hosting business to grow big quickly then sell out to a more enterprisey company (as happened with EV1Servers, Softlayer, Heroku) and if DO is taking such large amounts of funding, something will have to happen (IPO, acquisition, etc) and some companies don't make the transition well (I'm not saying DO wouldn't, but you never know).…

>> It's a common play in the hosting business to grow big quickly then sell out to a more enterprisey company (as happened with EV1Servers, Softlayer, Heroku) And that's exactly what Slicehost did, years ago. I wonder if Rackspace ever courted Linode. Slicehost always seemed to be the inferior one in price and performance.

Customer opinion too. I have old data on SliceHost (http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/25/slicehost/) versus Linode (http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/24/linode). Linode seemed to have the better rep and then SliceHost got dismantled. Tables seemed turned a bit now though with Digital Ocean (http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean) having a marginal lead over Linode. But DO's opinion has been slightly downward over the years and getting closer to Linode.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#94

Post by kawsper »

brianwawok wrote: post #38
gog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how things work. Once your system resolves the DNS record it will keep using that record for a while (depending on the TTL of the record and other factors). Your browser will also cache the result of the DNS lookup, and if that server goes down it will not try to do another DNS lookup for another host and your service will be unavailable. It will also be unavailable for any new customer that gets the "fau…

TTL does not matter because I am not adding or removing systems from my DNS record. Even during an outage, a request to my domain name will return both the broken and the working load balancers. I am simply giving a list of servers that can answer a request.. clients know to keep trying till one works. (Which they all do. Try it!)

Basecamp/SignalvsNoise/37signals had an article up on how they used Dyn.coms DNS service to achieve something like this, but I can't seem to find it. They had some nice graphs for when they tested it out.

Edit: My Google skills are poor, but I found it here: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3857-when-disaster-strikes

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#96

Post by alberth »

dubcanada wrote: post #72
alberth wrote: post #46

Has anyone used Vultr.com? I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).

I've used them. Their control panel is not as pretty, and their community is not as large. But the product is arguably better, they offer things that DO doesn't offer like DYO ISO, daily backups for the same cost as DO's weekly (seriously DO, only weekly backups???), and a ton more.

So if you had to choose between using DO or Vultr, which would it be and why?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#97

Post by vruiz »

brianwawok wrote: post #91
vruiz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure all clients will behave as you are experiencing. But in any case: > if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second That is not HA. Most people will not wait 30 seconds for a page to load. If your business looses money with every minute of downtime this is certainly not adequate. It's certainly not recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS#Drawbacks

Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year? How about services you use a lot. How many hours has hacker News been down in 2015 (yet you are still on it right now)? How many hours has netflix been down in 2015? How many hours has entire chunks of AWS been down in 2015? Every business is a spectrum. A HFT trading shop may decide that 1 second downtime per day is their max outage. A webpage adv…

> Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year?

It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP.

Anyway, I won't try to convince you to change your setup if you are happy with it, but it's obvious from the comments that I'm not the only one thinking it's a suboptimal solution, so at least some of us won't be considering DO for HA systems given the circumstances.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#98

Post by mpdehaan2 »

astrodust wrote: post #44
dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

For all the money Linode has on hand, and the size of their technical team, it's absolutely insulting they haven't made any tangible improvement to their management front-end in at least five years, if not more. The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.

Linode is good and simple if you have a not too large amount of nodes or complex need for extra bits, and I appreciate them for that.

I didn't really need anything shinier. Is it super-cloudy? Not so much, but also nice that you don't have to think about it.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#99

Post by kentor »

alberth wrote: post #46

Has anyone used Vultr.com? I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).

I've switched from DO to Vultr back when DO did not offer FreeBSD and DO's SFO network was pretty bad. I'm back on DO now because I've got my hands on some credits, but I would switch back to Vultr when I run out. DO's SFO network has improved I think, but for the $5 plan you get 50% more memory at Vultr (512mb vs 768mb).

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#100

Post by nailer »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
brianwawok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

"Why is DNS failover not recommended?" http://serverfault.com/questions/60553/why-is-dns-failover-n... Among other things, IE7 will pin IPs for 30 minutes, non-browser clients may have serious issues, etc.

> Among other things, IE7 will pin IPs for 30 minutes

What, regardless of TTL? That's gross.

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