It is very interesting to see how DO is expanding its portfolio slowly and steadily. Does anybody have a relatively large-scale (>50k users) mildly mission-critical applications running on DO? Can you share you experience with existing services?
2xLB + frontend servers (from 1 to N) + Postgres (master + multiple read slaves depending on frontned servers) + elasticsearch + redis + image servers.
Only thing that'd probably move us off DO is GCP adding Postgres to their Cloud SQL offering.
But overall, very happy.
I have been planning to use DO as my personal test-bed (for anything and everything).
Start with a small instance on DO, enable backups (for a small fee DO will create weekly backups of your instance), as your project grows, tune PgSQL and resize the instance up, add a slave, weekly backups of the instance might not be enough at this point, so also pg_dump the database at a more frequent time interval (1/day), send the backup to 1 or 2 offsite stores (S3/other remote server/etc).
Managed, comes with it's own problems as well, but at least you can blame someone else when it breaks :).
So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess.
Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this.
TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though
If you switch to AWS, will you be maintaining a cross-datacenter VPN connection or something?
To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?
Edit - we might actually be using the load balancer pretty soon as we prepare to scale.