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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

The main problem is DigitalOcean does not offer a centralized firewall, so they assume users will and can setup iptables. If they had a centralized firewall and default policy of all inbound traffic blocked and then you specifically open ports on droplets it would make a huge difference.

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Ok. Repeat after me, "I will not use Digital Ocean for production. They are not a real hosting company."

The why is left as an exercise for the reader.

Use Digital Ocean for simple production use cases. They are a real hosting company, they are affordable and they are simple to use.

Professional non-trivial usage should be on AWS/Google/Azure/SoftLayer.

Bzzzt! Wrong answer, try again. They are not good for anything remotely resembling production. Since your production should try and closely resemble everything else I'd say they are not good for anything at all. The tag line is "Cloud computing, designed for developers." They should be even more careful about good practices and sound design keeping in mind the kind of customer they are trying to get. Over the years they have done anything but that.

Could you give a few details as to why?

I run my personal server on DigitalOcean and it has been pretty good. At work we run a series of tier-2 services on DO and it's been great for our use cases. We used to run a cluster of 100 machines there and it was stable and cheap.

I realise it's very simple, and that isn't good for a lot of production services, but I don't understand the hate?

They are perfectly fine for anything production resembling a guy that wants to run 2 servers on the internet.

And they're certainly better than trying to run that on someone's home DSL connection.

Actually your DSL is probably more secure because it wasn't designed by complete muppets. Who thought it a good idea to put everyone on flat Layer 2 network. Remember the time they were handing out block devices without scrubbing. How is the new Ceph backed block service. What's the p50 latency? What about p90?

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