Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing:<p>* kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes.<p>* can't resize or add storage<p>* no freebsd support or custom kernels<p>* VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one.<p>* no IPv6<p>* somewhat shonky security reputation.<p>* cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been given even after filling in numerous forms at yahoo.<p>Apart from that, they're the best hosts out there. I pick them over Linode, Hetzner and EC2 but not colo. Even at the price point they're at.
I really like these guys. It's really no-nonsense hosting, which as a developer, is exactly what I need.<p>I've been (stupidly) running my website, VPN, and e-mail servers all on a single EC2 instance, mostly because I had a bunch of AWS credits. I got some Google Cloud credits, so decided to move it there. I then realized that I'm spending $60 a month on a single instance, which despite having "free" money, is stupid.<p>I split everything up into Docker containers, and run them on Droplets now. Sure, I pay $5/month now for each server, but that's fine. One of the e-mail servers is for my wedding; I'll turn it off when I don't need it anymore. The interface for bringing up new Droplets is simple and clean, and lets me do exactly what I need to, no more and no less.<p>If you look at AWS or Google Cloud, there are so many available services that it can be daunting to get simple things going. I mean, it's not <i>that</i> bad, but once you've seen DO's interface, you realize how unnecessary a lot of it is.<p>I would still likely use AWS/GC for cases where I need to respond to changing load needs, which incidentally, is exactly what you're supposed to use it for. A DO + AWS hybrid infrastructure would be most ideal IMHO.
Broken DigitalOcean promises:<p>IPv6 in Q4 2012: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-available" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava...</a><p>Ability to boot own kernel ("2-3 weeks from Feb 2013"): <a href="https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader-?page=4&per_page=20" rel="nofollow">https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...</a>
DigitalOcean banned me because I was using their server to fetch chromium's source code so that I could git-bundle/rsync it's 12 GB mammoth of a repo and download it to the third-world country that I live in (my network connection is really bad even though it's the best money can buy). Apparently I violated their TOS. As long as they limit their TOS to such narrow purposes as hosting a wordpress site or doing straight-forward things, I don't think they'll get too far. With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game.<p>Good luck anyways.
<i>First, it’s cheap.</i><p>Second, it's integrated. Which, to me at least, feels much more natural than AWS where you rent a virtual server, and then a database separately, persistent storage separately... Because it's integrated, it's also simple.<p>And they have a datacentre* in Amsterdam. Even two of them, right in the heart of the European Internet. That means latency to their servers is not noticeable in much of the EU.<p>* Yes, yes, probably more like a cage or whatever they rent.
I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate?<p>And in that vein, wouldn't the winner in each area just be the one who bought their hardware the most recently? Instructions/dollar are still increasing on each CPU generation, but it'll take more than one generation for each machine to pay itself off. So, whoever is closest to the current generation pays the least per instruction, and can charge the least.<p>Or, maybe it's memory/bandwidth, which are mostly commodity, but slightly bottlenecked by the hardware (e.g, max on a motherboard, NIC throughput). Maybe the combination of prices in cpu, memory, and bandwidth leave enough variation between competitors to keep the field a little open? I donno.<p>[1] Modulo concerns about their ssh key management. I haven't looked after the last news ping on it.
Classic TC title "to Take on AWS"... Don't make me laugh buddy. AWS is probably more than 1,000+ people operation with 30 different products and a marketplace, support and ops teams. DigitalOcean is purely a VM seller with no cloud or storage features.
I've been using DO for about 5 months now, and love it. I still host my main websites other places (dreamhost, who, despite some issues, has been consistent in improvement, and is fair in prices), and I use DO for stuff like mumble servers, a few games, as a ssh proxy from less secure locations, and as some as a shared shell with friends for various skullduggery and fun. Very impressed with DO's service and price, but even more so ease of use.<p>My main issue is that I would like a hardening script, instead of having to go through each new one I spin up and lock it down.
I've said many, many times that the best thing you can do as a budding dev is to spin up a VPS somewhere and start hacking.<p>A while ago, I started giving out VPSs to friends of mine to get them to stop making excuses about why they can't code.<p>Digital ocean, at $5/mo, has made this really easy :)
Love DigitalOcean. Sorta sad they still don't offer OpenBSD though.<p>OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, and the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.<p><a href="https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os-" rel="nofollow">https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...</a>
I am running these services in a $5/month DO droplet: dns [named], ntpd, httpd [apache], smtp [postfix], imap [dovecot], webmail [roundcube], vpn [pptpd]. It's taking 350MB off 500MB RAM.<p>Now after adding getmail to back up gmail I am now wondering what more I can do with it.
AWS is a cloud service provider with a huge ecosystem of services. Digital Ocean is a VPS provider.<p>It's like comparing a harddisk manufacturer to Apple.<p>Even EC2 is barely an overlap, since EC2 is a computation unit in the convenient form of a (very ephemeral) virtual server, not the virtual equivalent of an actual, permanent server. (And you're going to be in a world of hurt if you use them like that.)
If you can scale your system using only 0.5 GB per node, you get more cpu per dollar since the 5$ and 10$ levels both have 1 cpu. Higher levels seem to be multiples of the 10$ level. Does anyone have experience with this in a production system with a lot of users? Are there horizontally scalable database systems that work well on many nodes with only 512MB each?
Despite generally rock-solid performance and uptime, I had a bad experience with DO recently. After experiencing repeated hardware failures on a node (with lots of downtime), I followed the advise of their support and did a snapshot and destroy of the failing droplet and immediately attempted to create a new one from the snapshot. It failed to build. I then tried to build again from the automated backup they create when a droplet is destroyed, this also failed. Support just did not seem to understand the issue I was having, I kept getting canned responses about doing a snapshot then building a new droplet from the image, so I gave up.<p>The entire site had to be created again from backups on a different VPS provider. Surely their system should be able to migrate any droplets off failing nodes automatically, I mean hardware failures happen right?
I use linode and was drawing comparisons between two:
1. 8 cores on linode is what binds me to it. Linode rules here
2. Digital ocean is cheaper than linode
3. More Network transfer in linode (minimum 2TB)
4. Digital ocean offers more RAM
5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. DO Rules..<p>What else...
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage."<p>Looking at the feedback from their user base, and even rom my own experience, different storage options would be way more useful than IPv6 or even load balancing.
I moved my personal Web hosting from another provider to DO a couple of months ago. I'm spending the same amount I was paying the other provider, and I'm getting a <i>hell</i> of a lot more for my money. (I have two droplets running right now, one with my Web server and mail, one running some network services...and I have plenty of capacity on both to do more.) Plus, since it's an actual VPS as opposed to shared hosting, I have more control over it. I'm kicking myself for not having made the jump earlier.
Let's hope DO finally get their act together.<p>No Pooled Bandwidth
Networking and Route, as well as capacity need some work. Linode is much better in this regards.
No Custom Kernels
IPs Problem.
Still no deploy to different physical hardware by default.
No Private Networking on most of its DC.<p>And possibly many other small things i didn't mention. To me most of those are deal breaker. And my problems with them is that are not fixing or improving these problem quickly enough.<p>While Linode's SSD are quickly approaching, and has none of those drawbacks.
Do they have IPv6 yet?<p>What about actual security too?<p>Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player? (<a href="https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/</a>)<p>Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'. That's just stupid.<p>Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price gouging).<p>Full disclosure: Happy Linode customer.
$37.2m on a $153m post? That's a pretty big chunk of the company to give up. Looks like A16Z is going big on these guys. They're awesome, so that's great news!
Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple.<p>The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers.<p>The thing is with that much funding it doesn't really matter if their income is greater than expenses. They can continue for at least another few years regardless. During that time sane people who just need a VPS will take advantage of it.<p>My recommendation for DO's business model is simply to set a precedent and make it a policy that if you pay only $5 then you don't get any kind of free support. That is the only real cost that sticks. So I suggest having a few different monthly support options available starting at zero support for $0 and up. That is the main business issue a provider like this has is the conflict between the desire to provide good support and the need to keep unit costs low. And the solution is to separate support out. The main challenge to doing that is sort of a cultural/expectations/marketing issue.
Mark my words these guys are gonna be huge. Sure they are lacking in a lot of areas (like bananas mentions) but thats why you get VC funding and hire a badass like Jeff Lindsay (<a href="http://progrium.com" rel="nofollow">http://progrium.com</a>)<p>I'm really excited to see these dudes take on AWS with a higher-level and more performant platform.
Only tangentially related, but when did DigitalOcean redesign their website?<p>I think my initial dislike is due to it being changed, but there are tons of minor usability issues that I never noticed on their old website.<p>I'm happy to see a view for new articles in the tutorials database [0], but at the moment it doesn't make any sense. When I hit it just now, an article from 11 minutes ago is above an article from 1 minute ago. Not only that, an article on the 52nd page says "less than a minute ago". From clicking around, it seems like some process has touched every article recently and all those times, and how they are sorted, are meaningless. Also, at the moment the new and tending view gives the exact same outcome, at least for the first page.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles</a>
We run our infrastructure on both AWS and DigitalOcean.
1) DO consistently beats the price performance.
2) DO has simple pricing model --> No ondemand / reserved instances
3) AWS is more feature rich but DO continues to add new functionalities like private networking and new data centers
I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice.<p>I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and increased latency.
While not suitable for production operations, my go to has been a random one man vps shop. I have used him for years, because it is the cheapest plan I have seen. I pay $20/year per server, which makes it an easy decision to add another one whenever an idea comes up.
No matter where I go, the prices don't get any better than they do in OVH. A 240 GB SSD (2 X 120), quad core, 32 GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth for just $60/month?
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage."
A simple solution for load balancing and auto-scale will be amazing :)
I've been using DO for about a year, and I've been mostly happy with it but that's because the project I run <a href="http://www.mybema.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.mybema.com</a> doesn't receive as much traffic or active users as I'd like it to. DO has gone down far too many times in the last year for me to be able to be completely confident in them with a 100x userbase.
I use them for remote DC's (assia, EU, etc.) at $5 each.<p>Only their billing is a hot mess, mostly because they think it works and their customers are wrongly entering the CC #. For 4 months now, same problem and they have off-shore support that reads scripted answers. They just read the closest answer related to billing.
I am reading Ben Horowitz's book, and it is interesting to me that they made an investment into the same field as LoudCloud 15 years ago. Maybe they were just before their time.