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Comment by chrismarlow9 | Hacker News Reader

I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running.

I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way they setup for me to use the service and not have a fear of lockin. Does it take me 3 or 4 days to get new boxes? Yes. Is it causing a massive headache for me? No, because I plan things and order them ahead of time.

Just my 2 cents, I know others who use DO and love it.

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Same experience here. A few of my developers migrated our servers to DO 2 years ago to "save" a few hundred dollars. Turns out DO has planned downtime every other month and its cost us 100x more in staff and headache dealing with them. You can't run a SaaS or anything that requires uptime reliability (ie, any sizable business) . I've transferred our main site back to AWS. Also AWS dedicated pricing is now almost the same as DO, and much more reliable.

But congrats to the DO team. They will only get better.

So, Digital Ocean doesn't have great reliable up time then? I've been using OpenShift's free hosting tier to host a Ghost blog, and it goes down CONSTANTLY, making it unusable. I was about to start paying the $5 a month plan with Digital Ocean, but I'm not going to if it also goes down frequently.

hrrsn@lillith:~$ uptime 15:13:16 up 233 days, 20:35, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

YMMV, but I've had zero issues with DigitalOcean's reliability. This is a VM that has been running since I spun it up.

I agree. Our site, http://www.gurufoo.com, has had ZERO issues with reliability. Continuous uptime, no outages. Very happy.

Have you thought about Heroku free tier?

Heh. Nearly the same thing here but on a personal projects level, no company stuff. I really wanted it to be something I did or for there to be a solution because migration is never fun, but I finally had to bite the bullet.

EDIT: had no idea about the planned downtime. Maybe that explains the random chaos issues I had.

Why not just use AWS? Seems like you went from bad to slightly better.

There's no reason to fear virtualization, and the automation is definitely one of the best aspects of running in a major cloud.

Because I prefer a set of simple and basic tools used in combination to accomplish something instead of a "push this button and it does everything" approach. It's the *nix pipe mentality of combining simple well built tools to build solid and reliable things that you can adapt any way you please.

I also build things that are heavy on the network side, and virtualization drops networking performance a great deal (this may be changed these days, not sure).

Don't get me wrong. I don't fear virtualization. I use virtualbox and vmware heavily for development, and yes they do have a purpose, but it's a bad fit for the type of projects I build.

I just find that anything in life that just continues to add features for the sake of adding features, and create more and more "magic" push buttons to solve your problems eventually goes to crap and becomes a fragmented dependency hell that I would rather not deal with. And yes, I do love Golang.

What? AWS is great because it has a nice console but it also gives you direct access to all the VMs and there is a AWS command line you can install to program/script everything. What's missing here?

By your response, I can tell you haven't used AWS much. Using EC2 by itself is as simple as DO.

DO is much cheaper than AWS.

Who do you use for a dedicated provider?

joesdatacenter.com

I do not work for joes or have any affiliation. It's a very "non-automated" setup. You file a ticket with a rep to get new servers and describe what you want (I need 5 more servers just like X), no forms online to automate it or any of that. The plus side of that is you never get a canned response or ignored. Very quick and professional.

Anyone else reading this, they're not a bad budget provider at all. A good analogy to make would be they're like a small pizza place in your hometown, versus Limestone or FDC.

If you don't mind me piggy-backing, I have a non-affiliated love affair with ReliableSite.net. Yes - weird name, but I've had nothing but amazing, amazing experiences with them. The quality is 5x what you get for paying 1/5th the price.

Before anyone thinks about getting into hardware on this kind of level, please do your research @ webhostingtalk.com. Yes, $5 can go a long way with DigitalOcean because they're funded (and kind of got lucky); but that other $5 VM? Good luck.

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