On-topic: Thank you for this. I am going to purchase a DO box this weekend and play around with nginx instead of apache. For some reason when I last tried to use nginx, I could not get location {} to work. Granted it was some time ago.
Does anyone have any resources on nginx as a load balancer?
Another note, the share button at the bottom (just pushed a minute ago so hard refresh if it's cached) is from this plugin we put together and have been enjoying so far: https://github.com/carrot/share-button
Glad you enjoyed the article! Let us know if you run into any trouble, happy to help or add debugging techniques etc
EDIT: Updated, should work great on mobile devices now
We had very very bad experience with them, file-system corruption, hardware failures.
And we are still unable to recover all our data. And so far, no hope!
They don't answer any of the questions properly, my team is very upset. We felt, they don't have much technical expertise in managing servers.
DO might be okay for testing and learning, but never use them for any production setups.
Update: we are still struggling to get our data back. No hopes so far.
We shall write a detailed blog post on the whole experience with Digital Ocean.
I can't speak to using it to store lots of not-backed-up files or running a gigantic production server, but for learning about syops it works great, to get back to the purpose of this article.
I really just want to practice setting up and tearing down configurations. I think DO will be a good choice for this.
I actually transitioned all my apps off any other PAAS platforms (mostly nodejitsu, timed nicely with their 3x price increase) and am now hosting everything I run off a single $5 digital ocean box, which actually is saving me a bit of money, and deploys are a lot smoother. The company I work at, Carrot, is also hosting all of carrot.is on a $5 DO box, including this article, which has had no issues coping with the 600+ people on site at a time that have come with this HN blitz.
I'm not too worried about data losses tho, we do regular offsite backups.
They do more granular level monitoring to detect faulty hardware early and replace them faster.
Also greater technical support, having used both of them previously.
Just because you didn't perform backups, it doesn't mean that you should blame the host.
Even the best-of-the-best hosts will fail, but thing to consider is how fast can they resolve issues and are they proactively trying to improve.