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Comment by ElectronShak | Hacker News Reader

Whether it be setting up a LAMP stack on a server, securing nginx with Lets Encrypt, deploying a python ML model as a web service, you name it, DigitalOcean's tutorials just work. Thanks Digital Ocean!

PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.

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I've been a DO customer since 2013 and never in that time have I hosted any of my sites or apps on other platforms. They're super good in every department; support, pricing, tools, and of course, tutorials.

Only a shame they rolled out all the affiliate credits. In the first year I generated like $1,500 in affiliate revenue from a single review post I did.

At the rate of $5 per droplet, that's 25 years worth of hosting. I didn't get the full 25 but still happy to pay for their services.

Big fan of DO.

I have a Droplet I haven't accessed in 7 years. I'm pretty sure if I look at it the wrong way it will break, but it's been running the same app with no downtime like a champ.

Honestly, as another satisfied customer, I jumped on the opportunity to buy some of their stock. I believe it's a solid investment.

I agree DO is good in pricing, tools, and tutorials. But support? I've had terrible experiences with DO support, enough so that I fled to a different provider. Maybe they're improving, but DO tends to drop the account lock hammer quickly on first sign of any anomaly that the algorithm doesn't like, rendering the victim helpless and relegated to groveling and begging for compassion.

One can hope that a tweet gets picked up by HN or other media to get their attention, but alas, such is not typical.

Yeah, DO is great for personal projects but once business is involved I would migrate very quickly. I've had LBs run by them touched by mild DDOS activity and in response DO would simply turn off the LB in question - doing the attacker's job better than they ever could! And then good luck getting hold of support to, you know, turn it back on please.

I couldn't recommend them for any real business. Great to start with maybe, but make sure you have an exit plan.

Haha thanks, in the first month Ben wasn't quite happy with that and wanted us to call them virtual servers, but I overruled him ^_^

Without their tutorials, I would never have tried to do any of the things I'm doing for myself. Been a customer for many years after learning about it on HN. My employer has been a customer for almost as long since I use it to run a server for my teaching (thereby eliminating the need for me to do tech support for my students, which I hate). Their tutorials have brought in quite a few thousands in revenue just from me.

wtf? i came across some tutorials there for work (aka the place where we dont do things properly because we arent pad to do so) and it was all script kiddie crap targeting some specific ubuntu distro that wont work next month (or worse, all i remember was that this was particularly egregious and even worse than all the other tutorial crap ive seen in that period of time). these blogs have been common since the 2000s as a simple place to make ad revenue with little effort. they were never good and only come on the radar because they easily drown out actual real content on search engines.

also, the "popular this month" thing on the top front of css-tricks.com is buggy as hell (buttons go flying left and right depending on where you move the mouse, and other things, not sure how its even meant to be displayed)

i have another rant now: why do devs lack basic awareness which would be required to be aware of the fact that lazy loading content is bad for the user experience? is it because they are paid $100K-$200K (for now, this trend wont last forever) starting salaries in their bubble with fast connections? literally every single country outside the west has slow computers and internet, and every single piece of modern software are unusable on them. in the US meanwhile, you cant get fast internet either and 50% of users are on mobile which also once again brings you back to square one.

like wtf imagine being SOOO unaware of how your product is used that you think its only used on Reference hardware. seriously what have webdevs done in the last 14 years while i wasnt looking? i dont see one single thing that was improved. im pretty sure what happens is in their world they are hyper focused on some little head scratcher like "making this UI element be able to be hooked up in a declarative document cleanly in this specific way and having a declarative model of how it interacts with these other declarative components" and dont realize everything still sucks overall and is getting worse. none of that should be surprising though, because the web already obviously a bad idea 30 years ago when people decided that website owners should be able to make users do shit before being able to read/view the content

> because the web already obviously a bad idea 30 years ago when people decided that website owners should be able to make users do shit before being able to read/view the content

Are you sure that was in the original spec?

the _immiedate_ consequence of a document format having scripts in it is this. there is no far thinking required to realize this. it was obvious at the time.

I remember setting up Rails servers years ago and constantly referring to DO's tutorials.

I found the whole UI around the Droplets features is amazing compared to offerings from AWS/GCP. Props to the Digital Ocean UX/UI people

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