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> Provisioning is conceptually cheap, and this is their killer feature. You click the "Make a new VPS" button, you pick your distro, how much RAM you want, and an SSH key, and they spit out an IP address less than a minute later. `ssh root@198.xxx.xxx.xxx`

> There's also an API for automatic provisioning if that's your thing.

Oh, it is, and I wish these comparisons would consider the API more, since deploying a node via Linode's API and DigitalOcean's API are probably comparable. Declaring "my UI is faster!" as a sales point is disingenuous, since Linode is merely offering more choices during the provisioning workflow. Since you're saying "click", I assume you mean the UI too; at scale, absolutely nobody uses the UI any more. I manage a fleet in the thousands on AWS, and the last time I logged in to the AWS Web Console was about six months ago. It takes at least two minutes of clicking to spawn an instance in Amazon, but earlier today I launched 38 instances in about thirty seconds using the API.

> - No kernel upgrades. The kernel is kept outside of your virtual machine, which means that if you upgrade your kernel, then you'll get mismatched modules and your network interface won't come back. They've pinned kernel updates in ubuntu so this shouldn't be a problem, but you have to say "IgnorePkg = linux" in your /etc/pacman.conf if you're on arch. Security updates will be a pain though...

This isn't unique to DigitalOcean and is fundamental to the way Xen works (the kernel is loaded by the host, not the domU). However, Linode solved this problem better by providing kernels with most modules that you'd ever need built-in. You can upgrade all you want on your filesystem and not run the risk of hosing your machine, because your modules generally aren't considered at all. You can still add them by compiling against the upstream Linux sources, but the core modules aren't loaded from your filesystem (on my Linodes, my modules/ directory for the running kernel is empty). There's also a loader for your own kernel on the filesystem, PV-Grub, which DigitalOcean doesn't do.

> - You can't boot into a recovery image/liveCD. If the above happens to you, I assume you'll have to either restore from backup or file a ticket and ask them to pick things out of your VM's hard drive. (You do get raw console access provided by an HTML5 VNC client, which can be useful)

Only if you screwed networking. Lack of recovery = showstopper.

Thanks for the clarification!

Here's the docs for DO's API: https://www.digitalocean.com/api I agree that UI isn't strictly necessary, but the reason why I brought up the UI was because as an "amateur" user, that's what I care about.

>This isn't unique to DigitalOcean and is fundamental to the way Xen works

Digital Ocean uses KVM, not Xen, per https://www.digitalocean.com/faq so I'm not sure why they would need to pin the kernel.

Using external kernels isn't in any way fundamental to the way Xen works. Most standard setups (even PV) have the kernel inside the VM, which allows for standard upgrades, etc.

Why are you mounting customer images on your host fleet? Put another way, what do you supply for "kernel=" in xen.conf? A file from your customer's filesystem?

Why are you doing that?

"""- Provisioning is conceptually cheap, and this is their killer feature. You click the "Make a new VPS" button, you pick your distro, how much RAM you want, and an SSH key, and they spit out an IP address less than a minute later. `ssh root@198.xxx.xxx.xxx`

This is much nicer than eg. finding or downloading a box to mess with Vagrant or taking who knows how many hours to set up your own distribution in VirtualBox."""

I don't get this; finding or creating a base box for each disribution you want to use is a one-time cost. There are many existing boxes listed at http://www.vagrantbox.es/.

For 512MB/1GB Droplets in their EU location (Amsterdam) they have run out of IPs. I was planning on switching to DigitalOcean but that is holding me back at the moment.

And since you mentioned it, I have been following their Twitter replies and apparently private networks are coming soon (https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/321650732703023105).

(A bit of followup regarding payment tracking: you can click on "Billing" --> "View my current charges" to see a breakdown of just how much you owe. I presume it's updated daily if not hourly, but I didn't realize this when I composed my post.)