The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean | Hacker News Reader

The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

news.netcraft.com

253 pointsbeigeotter161 comments

What's even more exciting is that there's a Vagrant provider for DigitalOcean! I tried it yesterday and it seems to actually work: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean

Basically you put your DO api key in your Vagrant file, and then running "vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean" spins up a new ubuntu VM and runs your chef/puppet provisioner code on them. It's awesome!

It uses rsync to mirror your vagrant project directory to /vagrant, which is a actually better workflow for some use cases (eg hosting) than virtualbox shared folders.

You just sold me on trying it.

OK, now I have to try Vagrant, too!

It doesn't seem to work with puppet. Only chef: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37

Actually, I reloaded the issue and it was closed. Looks like digital ocean wins :)

NewsBlur is mentioned in the article, but I cannot overstate how positive my experience with DigitalOcean has been. I'm stressing their biggest machines and spinning up dozens of differently configured boxes and they've handled it swimmingly well. Between the price and the performance differences, I'm glad I switched.

I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.

How is their network performance in your experience? I think that's the only place I've found them deficient compared to EC2 or others.

Network performance is fine, network reliability is the one you need to watch out for. I'm still working on getting some automated script to detect longer than expected timeouts through HAProxy and then issue a VM reboot through DO's API. It happens often enough that if I experience intermittent downtime, I turn to HAProxy's stats before looking at my munin graphs. But these things will resolve and ease in time. Bleeding edge is well named.

We are using a Cisco based network and working closely with them to build a resilient network architecture. We've already encountered a number of bugs within Cisco's platform that have surfaced and are working closely with their TAC to escalate and resolve them permanently not only for DigitalOcean but all providers world wide.

FYI I;'ve no idea to whom you are referring when you say "we"

I'm guessing he's a Digital Ocean employee :)

I thought he was NSA

He's CEO, bitch.

If he's just the CEO then he's an employee :)

swimmingly well, hah, hah

Is anyone else bothered by the vague, overbroad restrictions in DigitalOcean's terms of service? Particularly:

"2.5 You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: [..] Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental"

Almost anything can be offensive to someone. I compared the Linode and AWS terms of service and neither has anything like this. While none of my own content is by any means extreme, the presence of this provision seems like a red flag and has kept me from switching to DO.

Wait, people actually read the Terms of Service?

If you're going to use it for your business it might be a good idea.

Most "people" don't, but if you're on Hacker News, I'm going to assume you're a little more tech-oriented than most "people."

In that case, check out ToS's on the services you use. They're, suprisingly, usually not that long or hard to read.

That's pretty standard boilerplate language for a ToS. It essentially protects DO from someone suing them because a client is doing something offensive (like say, running a mail server to email the Goatse pic to as many people as possible)

Wouldn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... protect them regardless?

Yes. And their lawyers know that. This is a permission to kick any client they wish, but it looks like it is boilerplate protection from abuse stuff.

> I compared the Linode and AWS terms of service and neither has anything like this.

"No Illegal, Harmful, or Offensive Use or Content" is literally the first point in the AWS ToS and is all about what is "offensive" http://aws.amazon.com/aup/

> You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for any illegal, harmful or offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is illegal, harmful, or offensive.

Given how cheap the price is, I don't think they have a sustainable business model. As far as I can see, there is nothing technically different from their model that allows their service to benefit from any type of economies (of scale/scope) in order to stay competitive. So then my overall question is - how can they offer better service and better hardware (i.e. more expensive) at a cheaper rate? I'm genuinely curious.

I'll stick with Linode until the company is more established.

Modern machines is my guess. Many other cloud providers and hosting companies are running machines from a few years ago. I don't believe the price has stayed competitive to the power, so DO is effectively arbitraging the price difference between 2010 machines and 2013 machines. That and their API makes it really easy to spin up more machines than you need, leading to some dead weight that doesn't harm your neighbors.

This doesn't sound sustainable. Four years from now, DigitalOcean will have a mix of machines just like the other hosting providers.

(Google Compute Engine is in the same position because right now they only run on Sandy Bridge.)

DigitalOcean is my fourth host in four years. I just spent two years with a company inexplicably named Reliable Hosting Services before I switched. Switching hosting providers is surprisingly easy, since I just replicate out my DBs and then eventually switch the primaries over to the new host.

My gut tells me that DigitalOcean has at least a couple years until I have to even think about comparing to other hosts again.

We're happy to have you on board! =]

They offer the same amount of RAM for less than Linode, but they offer fewer cores, which makes me suspect they're putting more VPS's on a single host. I haven't yet run any benchmarks, but I think Linode gives you more CPU and Digital Ocean gives you more memory. It's a little more complicated than "better service and better hardware at a cheaper rate."

To add a little bit of anecdata, I recently move from Linode to DigitalOcean.

On Linode I was getting jammed on I/O; on DigitalOcean I am jammed on CPU.

I'd be happy to give up half my RAM to get twice the cores, actually. I run a modest Wordpress network (http://ozblogistan.com.au). Once MySQL is humming, most of the CPU time is spent on various copies of PHP running the increasingly bloated Wordpress codebase.

(Yes, I've used opcode caching. I've never had good experiences with any of the major ones).

>(Yes, I've used opcode caching. I've never had good experiences with any of the major ones).

Just wondering, what were your experiences? Installing apc is basically apt-get install php-apc (if you're on Debian/Ubuntu), and that's about it unless you want to increase the memory limit. This will greatly reduce CPU usage.

My experience is that all the ones I've tried freeze up (is eAccelerator even around any more?).

I periodically try again.

Ah, yes, eAccelerator, I remember that one. Most people are probably using apc nowadays, and I haven't had any problems with it.

By the way: Starting with PHP 5.5, Zend's own opcode cache will be included by default.

Hi, I'm the CEO of DigitalOcean and we are not operating on a fantasy revenue model. All of our unit economics are positive and we are certainly here for the long haul with a sustainable business model.

To answer your question directly, and without knowing the exact cost structure of our competitors, I would have say that we are generating less margin per unit but we are overall sustainable and growing healthy.

You're making it up on volume (which, as long as there is some margin per unit, is fine). Congratulations!

I think the trick is (as it is with most vps providers), that most users, don't always use full memory and or full CPU usage, or even disk space. The full usage, if it ever happens usually happens in small bursts.

Most vps providers have a rule that you are not alowed to use 100% 24/7/365 or they can cancel your account (I don't know if this is true with DO). The trick is that if you have a lot of customers you can spread the cost on users who are not using full resources (which happens to be most users), at large scale you can make decent profit in this kind of setup, even if your revenue per account is low.

I didn't mention bandwidth because at DC level, BW is the least expensive component, but it is also true that most users will not use up 1TB per month.

Most of it is speculation from my part, and a bit from experience.

What you are describing is overselling, and I am under the impression that overselling is less possible with KVM, what DigitalOcean uses.

I don't think "overselling" is the right word in this, it implies degradation of performance because of too many VMs. My understanding, is that all VMs allow sharing resources, even KVM. But to my understanding, you can share memory on KVM, but not diskspace (at least not easily), which is why every single KVM offers out there have very small disk allocation. This works great for DO, because they are offering SSD, and SSD VPS (regardless the type of VM) are small in size, so it fits perfectly.

I think the whole idea with VPS, is that you can share resources, so there is nothing wrong with that, its the overselling part that should be of concern and I have no reason to believe that DO is overselling. Their performance is pretty good.

The point I was trying to make referring to the OP, that VPS like DO can be profitable even at such a low price, because of the way VPS work. Even with very small revenue, if you have enough customer you can make good money. That's why the math works. Most other KVM offerings are so expensive because they don't have that tipping point scale to make them profitable with the same price. But other hosts like Linode gets away with charging more, because of reputation. They already have a good thing going, unless they starts losing customers drastically, they don't have to change their pricing model.

I've spent a few months using more than the quota of processing of my linode, and they didn't even complain.

Yes, most users won't use all the allocated resources. They probably do oversell, but they do deliver the resources if you use them.

1 core/512MB/20GB ssd => $5. They state that they are running hexcore hardware. That translates to 6*$5 = $30 per month per server. So that's probably not making much money for them.

But then it looks better if they manage to sell the higher plans. 4cores/8GB/80GB ssd = $80, 2cores/4GB/60GB ssd = $40. These fit easily to single server and that's then $120 per month per server. Compare this to for example some of cheaper dedicated hardware providers like Hetzner [1] who are selling similar dedicated hardware for something like $60-70 per month.

Based on this it could be a sustainable business model, at least if they have enough volume (which seems to be the case, considering the Netcraft article).

(I assumed they are providing dedicated cores and using single socket servers. But it might make more sense to use some relatively cheap multi-cpu servers since with these plans the bottle neck seems to be on the numbers of cores side and not with the memory).

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

It isn't a dedicated core. Linode offers a $20/mo 8-core instance. That doesn't mean there aren't others sharing those cores. If Linode were offering 8-core Sandy Bridge E5-2670 servers with all 8 of those cores dedicated to you for $20, that would be quite a steal.

The RAM is guaranteed and the processor is shared. Amazon has been working a fixed-compute model on all except their Micro instances. Other providers are sharing cores.

Right now, DigitalOcean is limiting the number of cores exposed to smaller instances. They may change that in the future (there have been hints on their feedback site that they're looking into changing this so that smaller instances could have better burst capabilities).

I've been using DigitalOcean to host a GitLab instance for a while now (20GB Droplet) and it's been working great.

I ran into two small issues so far.

First of all, for some reason the traffic from my home connection is routed through New York (I'm in Europe using a Droplet in Amsterdam), resulting in a ~150ms RTT (I usually get 30-40ms to Amsterdam). Since this only happens with my home connection and it's fine in the office, my ISP might be the one to blame for this. Anyway, I've opened a ticket, so maybe they can fix it.

The other weird thing is how they hande kernels/kernel versions. You can't simply update your kernel through apt (or anything like that) - you have to select the kernel version from a gigantic drop-down (containing multiple kernel versions for every distribution you can run) in their UI. Plus, adding new kernels seems to be a manual process for them, since it takes a while until updated kernels become available.

I'm sure they're working on a better solution for that though. All in all, they offer great service for an even better price, so I'm happy with my choice.

Yes, the way kernels are managed is also something that annoys me. But it seems they're working on it: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea....

Actually reading the comments further might give you a more somber impression of what "working on it" is in this case. That said, I'll stay optimistic since my work doesn't depend on it and I'm happy to have another super cheap Arch instance.

The traffic is routed through NY to make it easier for the NSA.

Just received the following email from DigitalOcean:

Thank You! Today is a very special day for us. As you may or may not have heard, Netcraft released a recent report that details the history of our rapid growth in comparison to other cloud hosting providers. We are extremely humbled by this recognition and cannot thank our customers enough!

As we have grown over the past two years, we are continually indebted to our customers for your amazing support and feedback. Without you, DigitalOcean would not even dream of being where it is today.

According to Netcraft, over the past six months we've grown 5,084.64% in web-facing computers (instances) and are responsible for 10% of the total growth worldwide. DigitalOcean's more than 50-fold growth makes it the 72nd largest hosting provider in the world by web-facing computers. Last December, we were number 549; even last month we were still 102nd.

As your projects and endeavours scale, we will be there with amazing and reliable service, new features, and an unrestrained drive to create the simplest, strongest cloud that you can be proud to call home.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

You have brought us to this point. We cannot wait to keep rising together!

I moved everything I had at Linode over to DigitalOcean as well and performance has been excellent. I loved Linode's stability but their response to the recent security incident really pissed me off. On DigitalOcean, I have seen briefly the network issues mentioned by others, but things have been more stable the last month or so.

That said, one production server I work with on RackSpace was completely unavailable yesterday for nearly 5 hours, so paying more money doesn't necessarily give you better uptime. Just that one outage put DigitalOcean ahead in availability for my systems over the last 6 months.

Is there any reasonably simple framework for replicating across cloud providers?

Have you integrated something like Puppet or Chef into your workflow to ease the pain of spinning up specific servers such as app, db, workers, etc.?

We're actually working on that now.

I switched my personal projects from linode to digital ocean, for pricing but the performance is out of this world. The pricing allows me to run 4-5 of my projects for the same cost where I was at times maxing out the low-grade linode box that I had.

I later switched all my office's projects there from AWS and cut costs by over 85%. I also saw a significant performance bump allowing me to reduce the number of machines that I had active.

I cannot overstate how pleased I have been, their APIs compete with EC2, their performance is better than what I have seen on any competitor.

I am one very pleased customer. My _only_ complaint is that they aren't delivering on features at the rate they previously were. Though, after reading this article, I can understand a little better as to why.

You hit the nail on the head =]

The growth has been fantastic and we are super excited. Unfortunately managing it requires as much work as engineering new features. The good news is we've been hiring and growing the team and we're hopeful we'll get back to our regular development schedule in the next 2 months after we've gotten everyone up to speed and worked out some of the speed bumps. =]

I have been using Digital Ocean as a sandbox for playing with Docker, and it has been great. I can spin up a server in less then 1 minute, install the Docker dependencies, and be up in running in no time. I do what I need to do, and then I spin it down if I don't need it anymore.

I wrote down my notes on how to get Docker running on Digital Ocean, if anyone wants to play with it. There is even a promo code for a $10 credit for new signups.

http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digita...

I had a couple of issues when I first tried using them, but I was able to get help pretty quickly on a Saturday morning no less. I haven't used them for anything production quality yet, I have most of that stuff on EC2 and Rackspace right now, but I hope to start moving some smaller projects to DO as they come up.

Someone else mentioned this already as well, but the SSD is so nice compared to EC2's EBS, so if you are doing anything with lots of I/O then it is a must have.

Thanks. I was up in running in no time following those directions. Oddly enough the first few tries running hello world came back with 502 errors:

> root@docker:/proc# docker run base /bin/echo hello world Pulling repository base from https://index.docker.io/v1 2013/06/13 22:19:37 HTTP code: 502

After about 2 minutes it just started working. Was that a networking hiccup and on which side?

This was a temporary problem due to a AWS DNS Resolution issue[1], but it seems to be back now. Do you confirm?

http://status.aws.amazon.com/ [1] 3:42 PM PDT We are investigating DNS resolution issues in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Looks like maybe it should be hosted on Digital Ocean ;)

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

I've also had the pingdom monitoring on a droplet for the last 2 months and the only downtime I've been alerted to was my fault. Maybe it's on your end?

I used the LAMP stack (in beta) with a low traffic site running PHP5 + MySQL5. Nothing too fancy.

I'm using a 1gb droplet, ubuntu 12.10 with a LEMP stack, PHP5 and MySQL 5 for a low traffic site (Xenforo-based forum) as well. Maybe the difference is nginx vs Apache?

edit: I also added an additional 1gb as swap space, which helped prevent my mysql instance from falling over with low memory at times.

Apache defaults to using prefork on Linux.

Prefork is pretty much Apache-speak for "please munch all my memory and then lock up if more than a handful of people turn up at once".

Nginx or Lighttpd + PHP-FPM behave almost as badly if you choose dynamic mode and don't pick the right values.

I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?

Mine is in New York. Pingdom is configured to 1 minute resolution and I had 54 minutes of downtime in the last 30 days. Maybe I need to take a snapshot and spin up another instance. Thanks for your reference point.

No problem. I've been quite happy with them so far. I was using BuyVM for my side projects, but was getting annoyed with dealing with constant downtime, and other issues. I was starting to consider Linode, but ended up going with DigitalOcean due to the price. I really hope they can keep up the reliability that I've been experiencing.

About 4 months ago I moved a mail server from a 2GB Linode instance (london) to a 4GB DO instance (amsterdam) and overall I've been very happy with them. No major outages, the cost saving is huge and I/O performance is great.

The only negative so far is network reliability. Every once in a while my monitoring stuff fails to establish a connection to the DO box. It's transient though and usually connectivity comes back within 2 to 5 minutes. The box is running a low traffic mail server so it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to worry about yet. Other than that, I'm a happy bunny.

I switched to these guys after my reserved instance ran out at AWS. I was paying $50 a month for EC2 small, which was super slow. Since switching to DigitalOcean, not only am I paying $10 a month, but my site feels much much faster now. DO wins because IO is very fast on the SSDs. By comparison, Amazon's EBS is glacial.

Local SSDs are always going to beat out iSCSI (which is what Amazon EBS' are under the hood).

I tried to make the switch, but found the network to be too unstable.

I have several servers on Linode, that communicates over the internal network (PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, Beanstalk etc.) and a bunch of app-servers. If their line of communication is broken, nothing works.

Now I only use my server at DigitalOcean as routing traffic when I am travelling.

Just an anecdote, but I recently launched a little side project and DigitalOcean crushed EC2 and Rackspace Cloud when I did some benchmarking. The low cost is appreciated but was NOT a factor in my decision.

So, which one did you pick, and why?

EC2 and Rackspace have a greater range of service than all the other guys (storage on demand, snapshots, private networks etc...), but at a very significant price difference.

Im not convinced meteoric is the best term for growth.

Meteors usually fall down (relative to Earth)

The Greek root actually means 'lofty'.

I love etymology: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm

Hence why the term "meteorology" refers to the study of the weather than the study of meteors.

And a "meteor" is something that's "suspended in the heavens".

I've played with DigitalOcean some. But I've kept my main VPS on Linode, and also recently recommended Linode for a group that I'm peripherally involved with.

Using SSDs for multi-tenant virtualized servers seems like a good idea to me. My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about.

However, I have the following reservations about DigitalOcean:

1. No IPv6 yet AFAIK. I figured that would be a priority given the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, particularly in Amsterdam.

2. Not all resource allocations are proportional to the price or amount of RAM. On Linode, a 4 GB VPS is 4 times as much as a 1 GB VPS in every way. On DigitalOcean, a 2 GB VPS only has 2x as much CPU, 2x as much storage, and 3x as much bandwidth as a 512 MB VPS. Don't get me wrong; the prices are great. It just doesn't seem like a logical way to allocate resources from a pool.

I asked them about IPv6 in January and they said "coming later this year". I'll certainly give them a closer look when that happens.

> My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm limited in my experience, but I believe that's not entirely the case. Modern SAN controllers are optimized for very consistent latency on spinning platter disks, even under heavy load. The big benefit that I see in SSD-backed SANs is increased I/O bandwidth.

Here are a few benchmarks I ran against DO, Linode, and Hot Drupal (another provider I've used in the past): http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-be...

I've been very happy with my testing on Digital Ocean; the servers are fast, they remain up as much as any other provider, and the interface/service is great, and is improving every month.

The only sore spot is that two times I've had intermittent dropouts—once caused by someone DDoSing another DO site, and the other time for unexplained reasons. (And I know that the dropouts weren't just me, since I was monitoring things with https://servercheck.in/, which runs partly on Digital Ocean VPSes).

I've switched all my stuff from Linode and previous other hosting providers all to DIgitalOcean about 6 months ago and haven't been happier. Great group of guys there too.

Thank you for your kind words. We love you! =]

Oh Mitch, you really know how to make a guy blush.

I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment.

How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity.

I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure.

EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.

I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.

Support is quick to reply but often there is nothing they can do. I've tried contacting regarding both technical problems and billing issues and in both occasions they couldn't do nothing to help.

Wait, you lose connectivity or the VM goes down? They're very different things...

VM loses connectivity. When I try to ssh - it times out. Also can't connect to anything FROM that VM.

Are you speaking about linode or digitalocean?

Digital Ocean

I switched from prgmr.com to DO recently simply because of the additional RAM (double) for the same price. I really like prgmr.com, and have been a customer of theirs for years, but the new machine is simply much faster (and the network latency is also much better).

Of course, this would probably be true switching to a new VPS provider after a few years of being on the same box.

One thing that's unique to DO in this regard, though, is that their onboarding process is super smooth. I was up and running very quickly.

I've been on DO for several months now and love them. And as far as reliability, I've had binarycanary pointed at my sites for about a month now with one outage that lasted about a minute and then resolved itself. To me, for the price/benefits, that's amazing.

One other thing people rarely mention with hosting, that's SUPER important to me, are the FAQs/Docs, and DO really comes through in that area imo.

Hi Garraeth!

Thank so much for the shoutout about the docs. We are very focused on building up our developer community (with our IRC channel #digitalocean, forum, and tutorials) and growing as an educational resource. If you ever have any additional article requests, please feel free to send them to etel@digitalocean.com

Recently tried out DigitalOcean for a couple of small projects and already noticed some network reliability issues. My droplet was un-accessible for a couple of hours (at least) yesterday. Fortunately, it was for a non-production project and they were able to restore it within about a 1/2 hour. Verdict is still out for me, although I suspect that reliability will improve with time. I'm keeping production at Linode.

I noticed the same thing when I initially switched. I actually had them lose the box I was on, and the backups associated with it. They apologized and indicated it was an issue at the datacenter that they didn't have much control over. They gave me a really nice bit of credit on my account and I've since had no problems. I'm a fan of the pricing as well as their support.

I'm amazed you stuck with a host that lost your data. That would be a complete deal breaker for me; I've never lost so much as a byte with Linode over six years.

They lose my entire VPS too but I always think it's my job to backup my data (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra).

And they did credit me for their fault so I think it's fair enough.

> (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra).

They lost that as well in this case.

To be a bit more specific, I was moving some sites over from linode as a test to see if they would perform the same on DO. So effectively they only lost some test stuff. Still data loss though, like you said.

I want to like DigitalOcean but it seems their attitude to security is rather lax, see e.g. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... which they said they'd look at in February but haven't addressed.

This was resolved, thanks for highlighting it, need to get this uservoice entry updated.

Also we launched two factor auth recently.

We take security very seriously.

Thanks

It doesn't look resolved to me, check the key fingerprint on any Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server droplet:

ECDSA key fingerprint is 97:d7:21:81:9b:77:34:bb:f1:8e:86:25:b0:47:6b:ff.

Also: -rw------- 1 root root 227 Apr 25 2012 ssh_host_ecdsa_key

I can confirm this on a Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created 15 days ago.

Seems fixed on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created today.

There were three images that didn't like to regenerate host keys on their own when they were missing on the initial boot and we've update them today so it should all be cleared up now.

Thanks!

We have started with using DO for our test machines / intrusion detection boxes and were so happy with price/performance/ease of use that we ended up migrating most of our infrastructure over. We now have 45 boxes hosted on DO and couldn't be happier. The network reliability has been phenomenal so far compared to some of the other providers we've dealt with - Rackspace, SoftLayer, VPS.NET, etc.

My one gripe with DigitalOcean is that their customer support leaves a great deal to be desired. For days I've been unable to replicate images across regions (any droplet I try to create gets in a permanent stuck state and can't be killed). I filed a service ticket days ago and was told I'd receive a response shortly but have still heard nothing. I've even sent replies pleading for some recognition that my issue is being worked on, but have received no response and no indication that they are working on my ticket. This does not bode well considering that creating a droplet from an existing image is a major feature of their product, and is not properly working.

While I have liked DO when it works and their prices are great, it comes at a cost. In my case that cost is their product not properly functioning and their team seemingly having no intention of fixing my issue.

As someone who works in (completely unrelated) support, the numerous emails may be a contributing factor to your problem. Most support is done using last contact as the priority. When you send a new email, you're resetting that counter and bumping yourself to the bottom of the queue.

This was a problem we had with a /particular/ support system (Kayako) and we've since resolved it (with ZenDesk) but if they're using something silly like Kayako, that might be the reason.

Also, if they have a phone number, use it.

Not justifying what they do, just trying to help you work them out.

Hmmm, that might explain why Pebble (the smart watch) support had this super passive aggressive sounding "if you keep emailing us about the same issue, we'll put your case to the bottom of the list" instructions.

Not the message you really want to be sending your already disgruntled customers - "Do I mail them and check to see if they even got my email which hasn't had any response in two weeks, or will that just put me _another_ two weeks further down their already abysmally slow response queue?".

I am curious if there are any IOPS comparisons between DigitalOcean and real hardware (spinning disks)? Currently we run our Postgres instances on EC2, but are looking to move to get better IOPS. The question is: SSD-based VMs or real hardware? Cost is also a factor which is why DigitalOcean is a contender.

Check these out:

http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-perf...

http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121

Thanks but those are not what I am looking for. Linode and AWS run on VMs just like DO. The question is not SSD VM vs disk VM. It is SSD VM vs disk non-VM (real hardware).

iops are available on serverbear http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean

Thanks. This helps!

Depending on the size of your existing DB and the workload getting a larger sized VM - 16+GB you should see significant performance improvement.

Because it's hourly you can spin up and test and if it doesn't suit your needs will be a minimal charge.

We also made a promo code : NEWSYC10 - so you can get a $10 credit to test with before incurring any charges.

I made a thorough analysis recently and discovered that catalysthost.com would give me the best value for money. I am using a "Trenta" OpenVZ Ubuntu 12.04 machine for $15.99 per month and I am quite happy with the performance, including network performance. This is the spec of the vm:

4 CPU Cores 2GB RAM 512MB vSwap 60GB Storage 2TB Bandwidth @ 1Gbps

You can compare similar plans here:

http://serverbear.com/1826-trenta-catalysthost#benchmarks http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean

Is there a SKU for more disk-heavy workloads like a box running Postgres?

I'd love to be able to get more disk space (especially since you guys have SSDs, this will make PG very happy) without the extra CPU and memory. Is that currently possible with Digital Ocean?

No. I have spent hours searching for a cloud provider with decent disk space at a "decent" price, and it basically does not exist.

The only thing I have been able to find are physical hosts, with all the issues associated with them (40$ for 2 x 1 TB disk at http://ovh.com).

Argh, that's too bad, thanks for letting me know. Perhaps something along the lines of Heroku's Postgres hosting would be good?

Heroku is good because they take sysadmin/DBA headaches away from you, but I wouldn't call them cheap.

My take on this is that if you want or need to run your own database with a large amount of storage, there are three solutions:

- run it in house, which means you now need a redundant link to the internet, server class machines (redundant power supply), etc, etc, etc... Unlikely unless you already have your own data centre

- use a VM to which you can add storage (EC2, google, etc...). That is expensive (0.1$/GiB) but typically very reliable (they use redundant physical storage), and flexible (you can move your storage around, rebuild VMs etc...).

- use a colo site, or a rent a cheap physical. You get a lot of space for a very reasonable price, but have all the headaches of a physical (storage is only as redundant as you make it, no hardware mirroring/raid'ing, if the storage fails, you've lost your OS as well, and now have to restore from backup, changing OS means renting a second physical, install, transfer data, etc...).

Fair enough, thanks for explaining that. Seems like the EC2-like route makes the most sense if you're most budget and manpower constrained, even though the performance will be comparatively pretty abysmal.

I've used them for a few personal projects. I've loved everything so far.

It's a shame that they don't offer Windows as an OS and don't plan to.

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

I did some testing of .NET on Windows vs mono on Linux and unfortunately mono is just too slow. For the money saved on licenses more would have to be spent on hardware. Licensing is a pain though. Working out what you need and how to pay is non-trivial.

Are you able to elaborate on the testing you did? Did you raise any bug reports over with Mono?

I like the idea and concept of DO, but they don't support non-Linux which is pretty lame considering they are using KVM which can run a bunch of different stuff. I'm also curious how they do volume management, but these are just technical details :)

I'll also point out that a regular FreeBSD/NetBSD network install can be done in under 55 seconds, so thats not really a major feat to do when you're just copying images around.

But, they've productized it all very well so I'm happy to see someone taking a chunk out of EC2.

I'm currently using EC2 with RDS primarily because RDS provides major benefits to a non-DBA like me.

Given that I would prefer to keep using RDS, and the network latency etc., any thoughts/advise on how DO-RDS would perform compared to EC2-RDS, with everything being in N.CA/SF Zone and using comparable EC2/DO instances for running my app server?

Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision.

>>Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision.

I found the benchmarks in http://serverbear.com/ very reliable

I first found digital ocean on lowendbox when they were opening and even though I only host side projects on there, I've never had a problem with them.

I was never aware of their performance when compared to Linode and Rackspace until that one comparison on HN several months ago. With that being said, from their expansion from 10,000 instances when I first signed up to over 200,000 today, I have been, thoroughly, impressed with their servers and overall operation.

My experience has also been great so far, superb performance and great pricing.

It's also very nice to see them roll out new features on a pretty quick phase.

Happy Do customer, really nothing bad to say about them (yet). Been with them for couple of months now. Reminds me of slicehost, but with much much better price.

I love DO, favorite hosting environment ever. Still use Linode for some stuff, but only because I don't want to go through the headache of moving it.

I'm about to ditch DigitalOcean because I keep experiencing long lags in the ssh terminals. Sometimes when doing things that stress the terminal, like tail-ing a busy log file or running a full-screen app like top or vim, it will hang for minutes.

Sorry to hear! Are you still experiencing issues? Feel free to email me directly at mitch@digitalocean.com.

Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?

Probably, as the $5 instance is only 1 core. You might be able to squeeze more on if you aren't using much memory, or don't mind adding swap space (ssd swap is fast enough for me...)

It depends on a lot of things. Try load testing it.

I modified bees with machine guns to run on DigitalOcean instead of AWS, so you can load test to your heart's desire. it's here: https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns

I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says:

                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
    Mem:        503516     488644      14872          0       9036     203300
    -/+ buffers/cache:     276308     227208
    Swap:      1048572     153704     894868

Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd recommend adding a swapfile so you don't run out of memory at some point - since they're using SSDs, swapping is not that bad.)

Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?

GitLab is using puma (configured to 1 worker/8 threads in my case), and I'm running nginx in front of it. Sidekiq seems to be eating the biggest chunk of my memory (~20%), so I might be able to save some memory by tuning that.

Same as the other reply. I'm using Unicorn behind Nginx. Sidekiq is eating the biggest chunk of my memory too, and I haven't tried tuning it yet. Haven't "needed" to.

this is unlike heroku because you are given a server you have root access to. meaning you can actually setup unlimited* rails apps.

Inspired by the article I signed up and spun up a 512 mb droplet. It eventually came up(although took alot longer than the advertised 55 secs). Felt very sluggish, or maybe they run alot of startup scripts on boot? I tried running "top" and it ran a whole bunch of unfamiliar looking commands using 96% CPU. So I destroyed the droplet and wanted to try a 8gb/4core droplet. In the interface it says it was created in 173 seconds. But now 10 mins later I still cant ssh or ping the given IP. So while the pricing is definately good, and I like the idea of SSD-only storage, my first half-hour impression of the service was that it seems a bit rough around the edges and not something I would want to bet my company's hosting on.

Just to make sure you didn't miss a simple step (like I have before...) after you spin up an instance, they email you the ssh login details. Did you check your email?

I create new droplets from time to time and I've never had much of an issue provisioning new instances.

I had the same thing. Logged in to their web console with the details they sent and restarted the host.

It looks like the network didn't initialize correctly on the first go.

I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.

It's an artifact of small figures and small sample sizes generally. Anything which grows geometrically will grow progressively more slowly over time when expressed as a percentage.

Incorrect. If you were right, then every provider that was small would be skyrocketing up the usage charts. However, that's numerically impossible. Many smaller providers simply die off or never gain any traction.

This time next year, they'll likely be in the top 15 to top 25 on that same list.

Precisely. When a smaller provider goes from 1000 to 50 users, it's a "ZOMG 95% drop!" while only 950 users left, line noise for bigger providers. You're adding another example to my point.

Naturally I didn't say that all small numbers always change drastically. But those that do change, appear to be more drastic than larger numbers.

They are certainly generous with promos. Just today I got an unsolicited $5 credit and I haven't even burned through the original credit I got for signing up via Twitter.

Does anybody know if they offer anything equivalent to HOSTNAME.herokuapp.com?

I'm just testing them now, and I'm not ready to point a real domain at them yet.

Do you not have a domain of any sort? It would seem trivial to point TESTAPP.degachevdomain.com to the IP address of the server. Else, just go to the IP.

I have a bunch of domains, but I'm using DO for temporary apps, and would like the DNS records to be automatically created/destroyed along with the droplets.

I think this is a great idea. In many ways they're positioned to become a more flexible/performant version of Heroku. On the complexity scale from Heroku to AWS, they definitely sit right in the middle. It will be interesting to see which direction they tend towards as they add features. Personally I want a version of Heroku with the price/performance of digital ocean. In other words, by default you could use it like Heroku but it would allow you to SSH into machines and customize your software/configuration when you ran into problems. Maybe DO could offer a load balancer that would make it easy to deploy horizontally scaled application servers really easily. A nice DSL to describe the node configuration would go a long way... I suppose this is kind of what Vagrant is solving but they're approaching it from the development perspective, not deployment.

Digital Ocean is an amazing service. The only thing missing is private IPs. Once they implement it I will be making a full switch from linode.

The only issue I've had is that the network seems to drop every so often. Using them right now as an OpenVPN end point/IRC client.

Our CTO moved us (sleep.fm & SpeakerBlast) to DigitalOcean a few months ago.

We were using GoDaddy so this is definitely a step up!

I am a happy user of Digital Ocean. Thumbs up! Wish you all the best!

Has the quality of their billing system risen, too?

Congrats, this is a great win for DO.

Could you publish non-anonymized SSD reliability data?

When Google did publish their extensive HDD reliability study they removed all brand/model names, so it's pretty useless for consumers.

I suspect such data wouldn't be that useful even if it included model names because by the time you have good data on a model it's old enough that it's no longer price competitive.

Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Netflix is already deploying the brand new Crucial m500, although their monkeys probably care more about cost than reliability.

Sure, information on particular models is pretty useless, but dredging the data might turn up model series that tend to outperform other series/other brands.

I believe "meteoric" implies a quick fall. A light that burns brightly, but disappears quickly. Not sure the data warrants the use of that adjective in this context.

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