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brianwawok

Digital Ocean

- I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3 + SQS + ...

- Price is right for young startups

- Speed is nice

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DO is really nice. I use a little droplet myself and for the given price of 5-10 USD/month it is a great value.

Once you want something more I wonder if there are better options. Take there 320 USD/month plan. You get 32GB memory, 12 CoreProcessor, 320GB SSD disk and 7TB transfer. If I take a fixed price server at Hetzner I get 128 GB memory, 12 CoreProcessors, 2x240 GB SSD disk and 50TB transfer. Even the smaller machines are much beefier than what DO has to offer.

Once I am running a business 139 EUR {~155 USD} per month should both be fine.

I +1 the dedicated server.

100£ for such a monster: http://www.soyoustart.com/en/offers/sys-ip-6-s.xml is really reasonable, imho.

Impressive :) thank you for that.

That will always be the case, with AWS if you sign a contract with them it brings the price down compared to on-demand. If your using an on-demand service you will always pay a premium

I love Digital Ocean, I have been using them a while now.

I like the UI, the referral programme and the speed of there whole spinning up process and finally I was once in arrears by 2 months and they were pretty lenient with payment.

Talking about referrals if you want a free $10 - https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=c8555bae4f81

I want to love Digital Ocean but is there any talk about providing load balancers? It seems like as soon as you want to scale beyond one server you're stuck rolling your own with something like HA Proxy, but you've still got a single point of failure. I guess you have that with a hardware load balancer as well, but at least those things are specifically built to be available all of the time, versus just a piece of software you're running on yet another VM.

I'd also like to see a storage server - one with more storage than usual, without the necessary increase in cpu/memory/price.

Yeah I totally agree with you on that one, I don't really want to setup another server to have a load balancer. I would rather use a service like how AWS do it.

I just wish there was a single VM that wasn't SSD backed. I write web crawlers sometimes and I usually only have to parse the HTML / JS once into JSON or SQL, but I like to keep the data backed up just in case I need to re-parse it later, or to see the changes between crawls. It's completely impossible for me to even fit it on their $640 / month box. But I love Digital Ocean for everything else.

Couldn't you potentially push that aspect elsewhere, into a data storage solution like S3 or something (not sure of the cost efficiency, not a huge cloud guy myself). Then you'd just be utilizing the DO server for processing. It would have the added benefit of allowing you to scale your crawling horizontally if you wanted, as all your servers could have access to the same set of data.

Yeah I could, and I currently do - but I don't like to. I want the data on the same network for lots of reasons and I also don't like maintaining two sets of deployment systems. I'd prefer to just use Cloud66 + Digital Ocean and focus on writing code, not setting up and maintaining servers.

Oh yeah, I totally understand that, was just offering an alternative as a non-ideal workaround. I have the same set up for a service I offer, primarily because (afaik) it's hard to beat S3 pricing.

The traffic between datacenters would be significantly slower and more costly, though. Besides, S3 is not a replacement for a real drive.

It would be slower than on disk for sure, so if that's a concern, it wouldn't be a good choice. If the poster is just storing off results, pushing it to S3, or even potentially a document database could be a logical choice. They said they're just using it for occasionally re-parsing at a later date, so immediacy doesn't seem like a huge concern. Just a thought, at any rate.

Vultr, who have offerings very similar to DO, have a class of VMs called "Storage Series"[1]. In my experience their uptime is similar to DO and their performance is better. Might be of interest to you:

[1] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

Take a look at serverhub.com ssd cached vps, $5 per month for 500GB of diskspace.

Have you looked into the Kimsufi boxes? Sometimes they are available for 5 EUR/month. They come with a Atom cpu and 500 GB of storage.

That's why I like TransIP. Cheap SSD-backed VM + large network drive (up to 400TB).

akinder, it seems your account is "hellbanned" which means nobody can see your posts unless they are logged in and have showdead turned on.

(I'm sorry I have to clutter up the discussion with this, but it's the only way I can communicate this news to akinder)

You should check people's comment history before you tell them about hellbanning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885392

etc etc.

Do elaborate, please.

Hell banning serves a purpose. If you see someone who has been hell banned you check their post hostory. Sometimes the hellban is accidental in which case you let the person onow. In other cases it's probably deserved, in which case you either let the person know but remind them of the site guidelines or you don't let them know.

This poster has a bunch of posts that shouldn't be on HN.

Then those posts should be blocked, not his good ones. Sorry, but this guy is not abusive. And "hellbanning" is just the creepiest way to moderate a forum.

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