Hacker News Reader

Comment by icpmacdo | Hacker News Reader

I really think Amazon is about to kill DigitalOcean with LightSail. I have already spun up a few instances from LightSail and its almost a carbon copy of DO but with the power of the AWS ecosystem behind it. I think its now the prefect platform for startups with still pretty minimal costs but the ability to have my Node app on LightSail storage resources on S3 and have a managed database with RDS is a no brainer. I think people are a little too worried about the difference of a few dollars between AWS and DO now and are missing the amount of traffic you could handle for less than 100$ a month with LightSail and the ability to more easily scale later on.

View on HN

According to VPSBenchmarks Lightsail isn't comparable to other VPSes: http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n...

  >TLDR: Amazon Lightsail 1GB will melt down with less than 15% sustained cpu usage

And also in DO I can be sure that I won't pay more then 5$ per month. Even if I'm DDOSed. Since network is essentially unlimited (There are currently no network overcharges since metering doesn't work yet). In the future I assume that they would remove my site If I get DDOSed instead of sending me bill I can't pay.

But AWS: If you get DDOSed you just pay a large bill. Which can of course get nulled if Amazon feels like it but still.

On AWS you get a big bill, but they continue serving your content. With DigitalOcean, I've heard multiple reports that they simply disable your VPS until the DDoS ends, making your instance unreachable. With OVH, they include DDoS protection as standard. I use all three services and I like them all, but there are some big strengths and weaknesses to be aware of among them.

no! simply no!

DigitalOceans main selling point is not only the price and speed at which you setup a node. The main selling point is their freaking awesome support and their tutorial/help pages that help a lot of people with troubles that might have.

AWS, with its amazing stack size, cannot compare in those 2 departments IMO!

>their tutorial/help pages that help a lot of people with troubles that might have

Aren't these available for free?

Yea. Props to DO, but those are the docs I use when playing with apache/nginx config on EC2 instances.

I don't have experience with DigitalOcean support but there tutorial/help pages are indeed very useful, I have used them a lot.

Its an issue for DigitalOcean that if someones trying to install MongoDB on Ubuntu they can still use any VPS provider they want. The instructions that DO provides are not platform specific to them.

I still do want DigitalOcean to succeed though, I think there great and still love there product. I think building an S3 competitor(Not expandable volume storage) would make them more competitive. Its still going to be really tough though, right now any side project is going to be default on LightSail.

Their support is remarkably good, even on the lowest tiers. The most I ever had to wait was a few hours for a reply, and usually it's 30 minutes or less to get an initial response.

Over the years I've opened up a number of tickets on $5-20/month droplets for all sorts of problems. Even problems that were my own fault, which I received answers through either blog posts they linked me to or step by step instructions on how to fix it.

On multiple occasions they helped me recover from catastrophic errors like having SSH locked down to only accept connections with SSH keys but the SSH service died because I ran out of disk space. In this case they can mount a recovery disk to your droplet which will let you get at your file system.

I agree RDS is the killer feature here. I have not played with lighttsail but if I can one click launch a managed postgres instance, I'm sold.

You can still use RDS and connect to it from DigitalOcean.

Sure, and pay for egress.

    Data Transfer OUT From Amazon RDS To Internet
    First 1 GB / month	$0.000 per GB
    Up to 10 TB / month	$0.090 per GB
    Next 40 TB / month	$0.085 per GB

I hope not. Over-consolidation of this space would be bad for everyone as it would open up the potential for Amazon to monopolize the Internet core.

We will stick with DO and Vultr for most things. They also still have a bit of a performance edge.

AWS is already the monopoly. A couple of years ago it was reported that they were bigger than the next 17 competitors combined.

That's a dominant player but not a monopoly.

The danger is that we'll get to the point that >90% of Internet traffic in the US flows via AWS or uses something in AWS. At that point AWS owns the Internet and can start consolidating and shutting out other data centers and providers. It puts concepts like "peering" at risk.

That would be a monopoly. There would be only one way to host, at least for anything serious.

A hard oligopoly scenario with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon would not be much better. We want there to be many smaller players.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com