Comment by rwg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwg | Hacker News Reader

I looked at DigitalOcean's offerings and read through their forums several months ago when I was thinking about moving from a (pathetically underutilized) US$20/month Linode instance to a US$5/month DO droplet, but there were several red flags:

• Complaints about DO shutting down instances and locking accounts until people FAX'd in a copy of their driver's license, passport, etc. (If a user isn't breaking the law or violating the ToS, why does DO need identification? If a user is breaking the law or violating the ToS, then terminate their account!)

• Having to stop accepting signups in their Amsterdam location for a while because they ran out of IPv4 space but didn't support IPv6. (A message from August 2012 says, "we hope to have something in the works by Q4 2012 or Q1 2013." As far as I can tell, they still don't support IPv6 in any of their locations.)

• Not supporting the booting of custom kernels. (They've been stalling on this at least as long as IPv6 support.)

• Botching their Ubuntu image and having everyone's Ubuntu droplets sharing the same ssh host keys unless the user explicitly generated new ones. (Probably an honest mistake, but that's sloppy, especially considering they're effectively forcing users to use their distro images.)

The recent kerfluffle about not always wiping data after a user's disk image is destroyed would've also been a gigantic red flag (that had been doused in kerosene and lit on fire before being run up the flagpole) if it had happened a few months earlier.

To be fair, Linode's security/privacy record is far from spotless — they've been super evasive about breaches, and their handling of a data leak bug/vuln I reported didn't leave me with a super-awesome feeling — but my gut feeling is that Linode sucks just enough less to justify the US$15/month extra. That could easily change, though, but I imagine it would turn into "both suck, screw it, I'll suffer with an EC2 t1.micro instance."

From my perspective for DO which I host email, web and my SVN on. I'd be happy to roll out production apps on it as well (in fact I'm doing that today).

* No verification required for me. Perhaps this is a step when paying by paypal? I've been asked many times for more info when using that. If they pulled this on me, my backup MX will handle email until I get to sort it.

* AMS1 was unfortunate. I signed up when it wasn't available and I'm in Europe. I moved my machine to AMS2 when that came up (after their first day of scary high load). I had my host in NYC2 to start with and it was perfectly usable from London, UK over SSH. I couldn't tell the difference between it and my server in the house.

* Custom kernels. This is one of two gripes for me. I really want FreeBSD but failing that I want the latest Debian kernel. Keeping an eye on this one. I've got ufw/iptables up front which I have my fingers crossed will protect from any network level issues, logwatch, fail2ban etc to monitor casual attempts and patches are tracked.

* SSH key generation: I always regen my SSH keys anyway if I didn't see it happen so this would have been a non issue for me. This is crypto paranoia on my part (and well justified).

* Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?

To be fair, for $5/month it's not bad. Having played with shared hosting for 17 years, managed massive colo custom deployments and paid through the nose for other hosting, it's the best compromise so far.

I looked at Linode but the bottom end was slightly too expensive and I'd rather have SSDs behind it as IO contention on VPSs is usually rather high so that got ruled out.

I tried an Amazon EC2 micro instance and it was horribly slow so they didn't get my cash.

I'm running a custom installation of FreeBSD on CloudSigma ("custom" meaning custom ISO, custom installer, custom packages, etc.). CPU, disk and memory are configured separately, so no weird "profiles" to choose from. IIRC ElasticHosts allows the same.

Quick check suggests £3.75 vs £57.29 a month there. I'd pay up to £12/month for FreeBSD as a privilege.

You might enjoy looking at Bigv (http://bigv.io/) from the well-known UK company, Bytemark.

They offer a cloudy-type self-managed virtual machine platform which is close to your £12 budget.

I moved off bigv to digital ocean. Management and billing are far better on DO.

yeah unfortunately that 21 euros vs 5 bucks was the game killer for me.

Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?

And it's actually ticked by default in the GUI, just not in the API (which is dumb, yes).

Cant say I actually use the API myself but its the job of the consumer of the API to read and understand it properly and test as well :)

and one could also say that it's the job of the producer of the API to set safe and secure defaults for an API :)

Or provide no defaults therefore solving both problems.

it was changed postmortem

Are you sure? The original complaint was solely about the API. I'd either want a source or someone that saw it themselves.

How can a server in NYC be as responsive from London as one in your house? Laws of physics still apply...

They're close enough in round trip time for it to be indistinguishable for me on SSH. That is all.

Oh, SSH. I thought you meant ping (my home server has a latency of 0.3 ms, which is hard to beat even in the same city).

Maybe SSH on DigitalOcean is just really slow then. I moved my Linode from New Jersey to the maligned Fremont DC because the difference in ping was noticeable after I moved across the country. A Linode SSH session on a decent network is so snappy it feels like the box is on your home network (fast Vim editing and irssi sessions are possible because of the low latency).

"Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?"

Others have noted that it is ticked (I don't know).

But I will say that as a marketing move it's a good idea. Because you are actively informing users of something that they might not have thought about or that competitors don't mention or mention in a way that is ignored.

Amazon does a version of this with shipping. They allow you to select slower shipping for the same price as the default fast prime shipping.

This was done after the security hole was revealed.

IMHO, it should not even be an option, it should be default, always.

I paid with paypal, all they asked for was my cell phone number and what the site was about etc.

probably some bad apples were using it to host botnets or using credit card fraud

You forgot the most important point: Linode has Slackware.

People still use slackware?

At least one by the looks!

i run a SaaS on digital ocean, and i can confirm that all instances in a given datacenter may spontaniously reboot (and no record of this in the service status)

also performance on any given VM may be 5x difference than another vm in the dc. (at least at the $5 tier).

and yes, though there are technically 5 DC's to pick from, quite often there are less than 5 available when you want to provision a server. a few times I've seen only 1 DC available.

That said, if you understand and can tolerate this "sloppyness" then digital ocean is a great system. I am perfectly happy with their service right now.

EDIT: clarifying details, my SaaS has been going for about 6 months, and currently runs 25 digital ocean instances across all 5 of their DC's, so I think i have a pretty good sample size.

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