We <a href="https://commando.io" rel="nofollow">https://commando.io</a> use, love, and are sponsored by DigitalOcean. They've been awesome and amazing. The SliceHost of 2012/2013.<p>Some features we really want to see are when upgrading a droplet, the ability for the disk to increase in size. Right now, you have to image it, delete it, create a new droplet from the image, and pray that you keep the same IP address. Not a suitable solution for companies relying on uptime and stability.<p>Second, when creating a droplet, the ability to check a box, "ensure this droplet is provisioned on a different hypervisor then the rest of your droplets." Again, when building a highly available cluster, does absolutely no good if they are all on the same physical machine.<p>Finally, the ability to attach multiple ip addresses to a single droplet is a must have.<p>With that said, thanks DO, you guys rock!
I've still had absolutely no issues with my running droplets, though space is getting very tight in AMS1 at times when creating new ones. Their support is excellent even if you have a very specific question about their network, there's none of the fluffing around I've seen with other providers. It's cost effective even for my non-existent budget. Put simply, I'm pleased as punch.<p>I'm not usually vocally supportive of companies, but they're doing quite a good job: this article is a little undeserved.
IPv6 is something we get asked about a lot, and it's on the way. Unfortunately it's not something we can just "turn on" - We have to make sure it's build out properly and also fits in with some of our other roadmap items that our community will love in the coming year.<p>So yeah, love the feedback and actively working every day to bring any suck to zero.
Treat DigitalOcean as any other provider - something you can't trust, so always have backups of your own data in a place you trust (not a DigitalOcean snapshot) so you can restore when needed.<p>Personally I use Ansible <a href="http://www.ansibleworks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ansibleworks.com/</a> and rdiff-backup <a href="http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/" rel="nofollow">http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/</a>, along with Vagrant <a href="http://www.vagrantup.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vagrantup.com/</a> for testing. So the day something happens with my droplet on DigitalOcean - I'll just run Ansible on a fresh server and restore the remaining data with rdiff-backup.<p>Yes, the lack of IPv6, being unable to use a virtual machines bootloader, a lack of a decent rescue image, and no private networking apart from one location sucks. However for the price - it's a good deal.
"TL;DR: DigitalOcean is a good VPS provider with minor issues. I like them and have been using them for over a year." -- Thus a dishonest title.
I am pleased with DO but they overpromise way too often, or at least they used to. We were supposed to be able to install instances from ISO in 2012 as promised by their support tickets:<p><a href="http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3276477-allow-custom-images" rel="nofollow">http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...</a><p>It was last updated ONE YEAR AGO. Come on, that is outrageous.
I do wish there was something akin to S3 to allow for larger amounts of storage, without necessarily being bundled in complete package that gets upgraded together (and there would be no SSD required). Obviously using S3 is still an option, but it would be nice to have the network locality and maybe even the general value proposition that DigitalOcean provides.
Yesterday I went to pay my bill and it said "Automated Abuse Detection - Account Verification". Luckily I was able to ftp in and do a back-up.<p>After some back and forth my account was reinstated. It wasn't a huge deal but a shitty way to start my day. And after asking multiple times I was never told the reason why I had to go through this.<p>I had been happy until now. This just left a bad taste in my mouth.<p>edit: What pissed me off was having to send in a copy of my government issued ID.
A few weeks ago it was still possible to sniff traffic from other instances.<p><a href="http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53" rel="nofollow">http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53</a>
I was trying recently trying to estimate write-ahead log performance for my 2GB droplet, and for random sized (2-8k, 4.3k avg) sequential writes, my droplet is able to throw out 230MB/sec or ~60k 4k writes/second. I haven't actually done database benchmarks yet, but it looks pretty promising.
The title is very stupid especially since he is actually giving them a recommendation.<p>Anyway it comes down to the fact that its cheaper than any other large provider out there and almost always works very well. No one can beat that price with an actual usable service.<p>If I was going to complain about anything it would be the current lack of 2GB/4GB etc. droplets in San Francisco and the fact that launching a droplet from a smaller snapshot takes several minutes instead of one minute.
I run my web, email and some other stuff off a cheap end DO droplet for $5/month. Can't say I've had any problems other than availability of droplets in Amsterdam. I'm in the UK but have a VM in NY2. To be fair the latency feels about the same as our production kit which is 7 miles from my house, not 3460 miles. DO is less hops as well.
I don't use digital ocean because <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updates-for-arch-linux" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updat...</a>
I like DigitalOcean and these problems are annoying. I'd really like to run coreos. DO claimed they were near deploying a custom image feature months ago. But it has never materialized.<p>The lack of IPv6 is a pain but I can deal with it. And the screw up with the NY2 network going down for a day kind of soured things as well.<p>What I'd really like is for DO to be a bit faster with feature development and more transparent on their progress.
I use DigitalOcean, my application is not very large but response time is important. 20 GB is more than enough for me, even 10 GB would be enough. Being it SSD, it runs the short lived disk-based tasks I give (compilation & copying moving files) very fast due to its SSD, compared to AWS and others. This is my usecase and I am happy with it.
I won't use DO for everything, but I won't use Linode for everything either, and that's ok. I also use dedicated servers with VMs and they all have their place and purpose quite nicely.<p>With tools like docker, it's less about where you're hosting and more about being able to deploy to any infrastructure, as the only guarantee you'll have for the rest of your life is you'll be redeploying somewhere, be it with the same host or another one.<p>I think for what you pay, what you get, and the level of flexibility, DO is a great value and service in that it's not a random, small, no name vps provider that may disappear due to not managing their resources between the fine line of over or under subscribing.<p>Where I wouldn't get a Linode and recommend someone to get shared hosting, I can start them on DO and let them grow there, so I quite like the segment they've let me introduce dedicated VPS resources to.
For just needing an off-site VM for backup-relay-host/testing/debugging purposes, you just can't beat $5/month. Been very happy with them, and the fact that I can just throw $50 into my account and not have to worry about it for almost a year.
Been a big fan since their first deploy... grandfathering is nice for unlimited bandwidth... Use them for most test setups now, proof of concepts, etc... heck I've even got a domain pointed at them, and I've run my own DNS servers since the early 90s ;)
What I'm really looking forward to is better IP management. So far it looks like most cloud servers providers try to ignore the issue, which I'm really disappointed about. It looks like DO's answer to droplet failures is - set up a load balancer. OK, but what happens is that droplet disappears? What protection can I have against going completely offline for the duration of DNS TTL in that case? (And the time of manually changing it)<p>I see that as an unacceptable risk really - one thing that keeps me from using DO. Other services also lack the reserved IPS sometimes, but some of them at least provide an integrated solution (LBaaS style).
Been using them for a few weeks now for a private Minecraft server (<= 6 people, whitelisted). Additionally it serves a statically generated map over nginx and I've been trying to get OpenVPN to work. It's a $10 one, 1 gig of RAM in Amsterdam.<p>Generally I'm quite happy so far. The setup process and the management panel is awesome while the CPU performance is lacking a bit. I/O performance (both disk and network) is great.
I use smallest Digital Ocean package (Amsterdam) to run a play 2.x scala app. It is not a visited site (yet, heh) but I am very happy with it. And they gave me a coupon when I couldnt tinker with the project and cancelled, so I am back again :)<p>The sucks part fortunately havent affected me yet. I could use a little more ram but when I am there it could be changed with a click (and a reboot if I remember correctly).
I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean; great value and good quality.<p>If I had any complaint, it's that occasionally I get a droplet with a wonky IP address that seems to be shared with another host (like, the SSH host key wobbles between one and the other between invocations of ssh).<p>There was also some flakiness with NYC2 a couple of weeks ago, which caused some sadness and grief.<p>All in all, they're saving me multiple thousands of dollars.
Not seeing anyone here talk about it so maybe no one has had it happen to them, but how is everyone dealing with the disk failures? Seems like your one to two man startup could have a fun day ahead of them. Not to mention if it happened on your launch day. Coming from someone looking to use DO for a future project.
Recently moved a few sites to a single, 1GB droplet and am very, very happy with it. Also have been using a 512MB droplet for the last 3 months or so to run a tor relay. Their "one-click" installs are nice too, and WordPress runs really well on a 1GB droplet.
<p><pre><code> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.84315 s, 279 MB/s
</code></pre>
I was expecting it too be faster, actually. I get over 300 MB/s on a VPS with HDD at the company I work at. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://true.nl" rel="nofollow">https://true.nl</a>
I really dislike DigitalOcean. Terrible customer services.
And do not give them a way to bill you automatically, use something like paypal when YOU are in control and can just not buy the credit and run out.
I'm currently using Ubiquity SSD Cloud Servers and I'm happy with them, but still find it weird that its not that popular. Anyone else using them? Any difference between them and DO?
I want to say that I hate Digital Ocean as well. I am a University of Waterloo Computer Science student. I have CS 458 (computer security) this term. We had an assignment last month asking us to get all the users permission without knowing their password for a web app. Then I wrote a script. The use of the script is to use curl one time per second (may be longer, due to the connection issue) to guess all the different combination of the password. Of course I was using that script on Digital Ocean!<p>After running it two days, I receive an email saying their router find out that I was doing the DDOS and ask me to stop it. I stop the script immediately and reply them my reason telling them that I was doing it for University Assignment and I don't know that I was not allowed to do this. However, my account got suspends anyway. No matter how I send emails to beg them to give back my files in the server (I use the server for emacs and tmux to write codes for school projects), they just told me that sorry but my account is suspend. No matter how I beg them, all I received back from the email is just a max two line saying that my account is suspend. They do tell me that it suspends forever. After several days they deleted my account with all my files in it. Now I have no ways to get any of my files back! I feel ... so angry and hate so much about the digital ocean.<p>Is this how a normal American Company does? Will a normal American Company suspends customers account because that customer use it to do university work? I can understand it suspends me if I violate any laws but I was just doing an assignment and not violates anything. It also ignore the apology from the customer. Any evidence the customer provides is ignored gets well. Even that after couple days, digital ocean deleted that customer's account with all his files permanently!<p>This is my story. This is the reason why I hate Digital Ocean!!!!!!