7 ms·

Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow AWS,

Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow AWS, which is not necessary true with DO.

brianwawok 11y ago
Is it? You can peg the DO cpu. You can only use 5% of the cpu here. I think this is cool don't get me wrong. Lots of uses for a cheap low use server. But this is pretty niche.
- yid 11y ago
  From TFA: > The t2.nano offers the full performance of a high frequency Intel CPU core if your workload utilizes less than 5% of the core on average over 24 hours. This means you get the full CPU if you have a bursty workload, and really is no different from what DO's policy is: > We do not set a cap on CPU usage by default but we do monitor for droplets doing a consistent 100% CPU and may CPU limit droplets displaying this behavior. In the EC2 case, the CPU throttling policy is just explicit. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-and-memory-limit?answer=22036 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-a...
  - kbuck 11y ago
    Having been hit by AWS's CPU cap before (on the t2.micro instance type) and having used many other providers, I can tell you firsthand that AWS's CPU limits are MUCH lower than their competitors'. In our case, a sustained usage of about 15% CPU caused our VM to eventually be starved of CPU time, which in turn crashed the software running on it. I've never dealt with stricter CPU limits than AWS's. Most providers will not be happy if you peg an entire core to 100% (after all, the physical cores are oversold), but they usually don't mind if the percentage is even as big as 50%.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      You've outgrown the micro. The strict CPU accounting doesn't exist beyond the micro and the nano. I regularly pegged every core offered on 4xls and what not and never heard a peep from Amazon over several years. My point is this is an instance type thing, not a provider thing as you've extrapolated. They're experimenting with vast overselling on those instance types and it's not across the board.
      - eropple 11y ago
        Moreover, and this is something that I would think should be bleedingly obvious: this is exactly what those instance types are for. Everything up-front discusses CPU in terms of low usage and brief bursts. You're getting a discount because you're not using it in the same way as you would an M or a C or whatever.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      > Most providers will not be happy if you peg an entire core to 100% (after all, the physical cores are oversold) On anything that isn't a t1/t2 instance, AWS doesn't care a bit if you're pegged at 100% all month long.
nly 11y ago
How is less than half the storage and 1/500th the bandwidth competitive? The problem with dropping a care-free VPS (what DO is for, and what you're comparing against) on AWS has always been transfer. Even my least used personal VPS eats 25-30GB/month in outbound. How much does that cost at AWS? Another $5? and then you're constantly worried about your usage month on month. I'd rather give $10-20/month to DO/Vultr/Linode to begin with and get more memory as a bonus.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  I'd rather pay slightly more for an ovh server and not have to worry about nickeling and diming... And whether my system will crash overnight because it needs more than 1 gig of RAM
  - tachion 11y ago
    I'd rather not have any infrastructure, than to run OVH servers. This is least reliable company out there, that fails its customers in every possible way every now and then. Friends dont let friends use OVH. Go with Hetzner or Online instead.
    - AznHisoka 11y ago
      Or go with both. I use ovh with hetzner as a hot backup. Because the price is affordable.
asselinpaul 11y ago
Curious as to how one would outgrow DO.
- nodesocket 11y ago
  No centralized firewall (security groups), no ELBS, no EBS, no autoscaling, no ElastiCache, no RDS... Do I need to continue?
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Those aren't all strictly necessary or necessarily provided by hosting service in order to grow, tho?
jsmthrowaway 11y ago
No real reason to use Linode any more, either. The AWS skill set is valuable in the industry and using it for your personal stuff gives you a leg up careerwise. My AWS skills (VPC architecture, Direct Connect, boto, etc.) have been a big hiring plus for me in the past. Since nobody relevant uses Linode for production any more due to security and other issues, probably time to move personal blogs and accrue transferable skills. People also compare the big holy wow bandwidth/SSD/CPU offered by DO and Linode without accounting for the fact that you could almost never use it all at the price point without hitting (a) capacities of the instance and (b) annoyed employees. Jeff's data on how successful their CPU quota accounting is backs this up. If you're pegging a core in your workload you should probably own the core. Seriously, think about it. DO offers you a terabyte on the low end plan. You have to sustain 3 megabit/sec every second of every day to hit that. Maybe in some scenarios you are, but almost nobody running personal gear is doing that. The higher levels are even more ridiculous. But the sales stuff works: people are concerned about it in this thread, merely the potential to use instead of paying for actual.
- copperx 11y ago
  > nobody relevant uses Linode for production any more due to security and other issues I'm not in the industry (I'm in higher education), but this is news to me. Are there any use cases where Digital Ocean/Linode would be better than AWS? A small blog, website, perhaps?
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    With the introduction of the t2.nano, not really. Even if you don't want to go Amazon, GCE is super useful for personal stuff too. Old school VPS providers can't compete due to resources. Amazon and Google have far more people working on perf, security, and so on. Sadly, VPS providers are going the way of shared hosting.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      You mean they'll still be around a long time and cheaper than ever? ;)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
_hyn3 11y ago
Only if you're not actually using that instance! You can't even log into the instance at all for that price. You also have to pay for bandwidth (very expensive) and EBS (not bad, unless you want it to be as fast as DO's local SSD). Setting aside that the DO droplets are far more bang for the buck in terms of consistent CPU usage, and also (to be fair) that AWS offers far more scalability options, bandwidth alone is shockingly expensive at AWS. At 9 cents per GB, you'd be looking at $90/mo for bandwidth alone for what DO gives you included in the $5/mo. The $80/mo Digital Ocean server w/ 5TB of transfer would cost $450 at EC2 JUST IN BANDWIDTH ALONE!! And, at DO, if you exceed that bandwidth allocation that's included for free, it's $20/TB vs $90/TB at EC2 (both charge outgoing only). These are costs that most people don't consider but really amount to poorly explained fine print costs. (Others include Glacier restore pricing, intra-region bandwidth, etc.) (disclaimer: I'm an AWS certified SA and my SSH key manager startup, Userify[1], is an AWS partner, but even so we are still forced to use DO for a large part of our infrastructure -- especially where bandwidth is concerned.) 1. https://userify.com https://userify.com (cloud ssh key management)
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  And to use 5TB in a month you have to sustain over 15 megabit/sec 24 hours a day. DO is betting on you not doing that (and in aggregate nobody does), because in any other context sustaining 15 megabit is about as expensive as Amazon. Quote a 100 megabit drop some time if you don't believe me. If every VPS on Digital Ocean and Linode actually used their quota, they wouldn't have uplink capacity to support it and the network would fail. That's overselling. Numbers that high are extensive overselling. Linode has 40 Gbit links (at least they used to), and give 2 TB (6 Mbps) to each small Linode, meaning about 7,000 Linodes actually using the quota would saturate the link. They have a few more than that. Do the math. The bandwidth quotas are sales stuff so that you will say exactly this in threads like these, and it's amazing how well it works.
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    The oversubscription model actually works, just like insurance does. We consume massive amounts of bandwidth on a continuous basis due to thousands of servers checking in. (We're not spikey in our bandwidth or CPU -- we're surprisingly rigid at 87% to 90% continuous.) We're anomalous, which kinda proves the point. What is ironic about your statement is that t2 CPU allocations are massively oversubscribed in the same way. (but far more aggressively!)
msravi 11y ago
I'm actually contemplating moving out of AWS to DO. I signed up for a 1-year m3.medium reserved instance with AWS (Singapore region) sometime in May when the reserved instance cost was ~$50/month (it's now $35/month but I'm stuck with their old rate). This doesn't include bandwidth and IO requests. I might understand charging separately for bandwidth, but IO requests? I end up making between 75M to 95M IO requests, and it adds a good $8 or so to my bill. Plus, there's EBS which for 60GB (not SSD!) adds another $6. So all in all, for ~$65 I'm getting a single core, 3.75GB RAM, 60GB storage, and am stuck with their old pricing for a year, whereas with DO for $40 I can get 2 cores, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD and no "IO request" costs! It's DO as soon as my 1-year is done.
- josegonzalez 11y ago
  IO requests on ebs-backed volumes go across the network, so I guess they are charging for internal bandwidth in some sense.
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached. DO is still a better deal overall. For crazy dynamic workloads with moderate bandwidth usage, AWS makes good financial sense. Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal. (As are DynamoDB, Redshift, Lambda, and Kinesis, but these can get expensive fast.) AWS really has simply awesome technology, and they can afford to charge what they want for it, and I do believe they strike a pretty good balance most of the time. Also, the Free Tier is really very nice and fair. I'd just like to see the cost model get a bit more transparent and a bit lower in fees, especially on the low end.
  - msravi 11y ago
    > EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached I didn't know that. Thank you! > Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal I agree. Which is why I'm going to continue using S3 for my daily backups but move to DO for compute.
- ersoft 11y ago
  Did you check out Google Cloud ? I moved all my company's instances to them and I ended up cheaper than on Vultr (similar pricing with DO), while also benefiting to more features (storage, mysql, etc) and better uptime. For 28$/month you can get a similar instances as on amazon (1CPU and 3.75GB RAM) and 60GB SSD is another 10$. 60GB standard storage is 2.40$. I'm impressed that Google Cloud is adding a couple of new features every month and I can see them a strong AWS competitor soon.
frik 11y ago
Are there any dedicated server hosters that can compete with AWS/DO in pricing and flexible web interface? (I heard good things about Hetzner, but I would need something in US).

Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow AWS, which is not necessary true with DO.

brianwawok 11y ago

Is it? You can peg the DO cpu. You can only use 5% of the cpu here. I think this is cool don't get me wrong. Lots of uses for a cheap low use server. But this is pretty niche.

yid 11y ago
From TFA: > The t2.nano offers the full performance of a high frequency Intel CPU core if your workload utilizes less than 5% of the core on average over 24 hours. This means you get the full CPU if you have a bursty workload, and really is no different from what DO's policy is: > We do not set a cap on CPU usage by default but we do monitor for droplets doing a consistent 100% CPU and may CPU limit droplets displaying this behavior. In the EC2 case, the CPU throttling policy is just explicit. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-and-memory-limit?answer=22036 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-a...
- kbuck 11y ago
  Having been hit by AWS's CPU cap before (on the t2.micro instance type) and having used many other providers, I can tell you firsthand that AWS's CPU limits are MUCH lower than their competitors'. In our case, a sustained usage of about 15% CPU caused our VM to eventually be starved of CPU time, which in turn crashed the software running on it. I've never dealt with stricter CPU limits than AWS's. Most providers will not be happy if you peg an entire core to 100% (after all, the physical cores are oversold), but they usually don't mind if the percentage is even as big as 50%.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    You've outgrown the micro. The strict CPU accounting doesn't exist beyond the micro and the nano. I regularly pegged every core offered on 4xls and what not and never heard a peep from Amazon over several years. My point is this is an instance type thing, not a provider thing as you've extrapolated. They're experimenting with vast overselling on those instance types and it's not across the board.
    - eropple 11y ago
      Moreover, and this is something that I would think should be bleedingly obvious: this is exactly what those instance types are for. Everything up-front discusses CPU in terms of low usage and brief bursts. You're getting a discount because you're not using it in the same way as you would an M or a C or whatever.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    > Most providers will not be happy if you peg an entire core to 100% (after all, the physical cores are oversold) On anything that isn't a t1/t2 instance, AWS doesn't care a bit if you're pegged at 100% all month long.

nly 11y ago

How is less than half the storage and 1/500th the bandwidth competitive? The problem with dropping a care-free VPS (what DO is for, and what you're comparing against) on AWS has always been transfer. Even my least used personal VPS eats 25-30GB/month in outbound. How much does that cost at AWS? Another $5? and then you're constantly worried about your usage month on month. I'd rather give $10-20/month to DO/Vultr/Linode to begin with and get more memory as a bonus.

AznHisoka 11y ago
I'd rather pay slightly more for an ovh server and not have to worry about nickeling and diming... And whether my system will crash overnight because it needs more than 1 gig of RAM
- tachion 11y ago
  I'd rather not have any infrastructure, than to run OVH servers. This is least reliable company out there, that fails its customers in every possible way every now and then. Friends dont let friends use OVH. Go with Hetzner or Online instead.
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    Or go with both. I use ovh with hetzner as a hot backup. Because the price is affordable.

asselinpaul 11y ago

Curious as to how one would outgrow DO.

nodesocket 11y ago
No centralized firewall (security groups), no ELBS, no EBS, no autoscaling, no ElastiCache, no RDS... Do I need to continue?
- pbreit 11y ago
  Those aren't all strictly necessary or necessarily provided by hosting service in order to grow, tho?

jsmthrowaway 11y ago

No real reason to use Linode any more, either. The AWS skill set is valuable in the industry and using it for your personal stuff gives you a leg up careerwise. My AWS skills (VPC architecture, Direct Connect, boto, etc.) have been a big hiring plus for me in the past. Since nobody relevant uses Linode for production any more due to security and other issues, probably time to move personal blogs and accrue transferable skills. People also compare the big holy wow bandwidth/SSD/CPU offered by DO and Linode without accounting for the fact that you could almost never use it all at the price point without hitting (a) capacities of the instance and (b) annoyed employees. Jeff's data on how successful their CPU quota accounting is backs this up. If you're pegging a core in your workload you should probably own the core. Seriously, think about it. DO offers you a terabyte on the low end plan. You have to sustain 3 megabit/sec every second of every day to hit that. Maybe in some scenarios you are, but almost nobody running personal gear is doing that. The higher levels are even more ridiculous. But the sales stuff works: people are concerned about it in this thread, merely the potential to use instead of paying for actual.

copperx 11y ago
> nobody relevant uses Linode for production any more due to security and other issues I'm not in the industry (I'm in higher education), but this is news to me. Are there any use cases where Digital Ocean/Linode would be better than AWS? A small blog, website, perhaps?
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  With the introduction of the t2.nano, not really. Even if you don't want to go Amazon, GCE is super useful for personal stuff too. Old school VPS providers can't compete due to resources. Amazon and Google have far more people working on perf, security, and so on. Sadly, VPS providers are going the way of shared hosting.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    You mean they'll still be around a long time and cheaper than ever? ;)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

_hyn3 11y ago

Only if you're not actually using that instance! You can't even log into the instance at all for that price. You also have to pay for bandwidth (very expensive) and EBS (not bad, unless you want it to be as fast as DO's local SSD). Setting aside that the DO droplets are far more bang for the buck in terms of consistent CPU usage, and also (to be fair) that AWS offers far more scalability options, bandwidth alone is shockingly expensive at AWS. At 9 cents per GB, you'd be looking at $90/mo for bandwidth alone for what DO gives you included in the $5/mo. The $80/mo Digital Ocean server w/ 5TB of transfer would cost $450 at EC2 JUST IN BANDWIDTH ALONE!! And, at DO, if you exceed that bandwidth allocation that's included for free, it's $20/TB vs $90/TB at EC2 (both charge outgoing only). These are costs that most people don't consider but really amount to poorly explained fine print costs. (Others include Glacier restore pricing, intra-region bandwidth, etc.) (disclaimer: I'm an AWS certified SA and my SSH key manager startup, Userify[1], is an AWS partner, but even so we are still forced to use DO for a large part of our infrastructure -- especially where bandwidth is concerned.) 1. https://userify.com https://userify.com (cloud ssh key management)

jsmthrowaway 11y ago
And to use 5TB in a month you have to sustain over 15 megabit/sec 24 hours a day. DO is betting on you not doing that (and in aggregate nobody does), because in any other context sustaining 15 megabit is about as expensive as Amazon. Quote a 100 megabit drop some time if you don't believe me. If every VPS on Digital Ocean and Linode actually used their quota, they wouldn't have uplink capacity to support it and the network would fail. That's overselling. Numbers that high are extensive overselling. Linode has 40 Gbit links (at least they used to), and give 2 TB (6 Mbps) to each small Linode, meaning about 7,000 Linodes actually using the quota would saturate the link. They have a few more than that. Do the math. The bandwidth quotas are sales stuff so that you will say exactly this in threads like these, and it's amazing how well it works.
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  The oversubscription model actually works, just like insurance does. We consume massive amounts of bandwidth on a continuous basis due to thousands of servers checking in. (We're not spikey in our bandwidth or CPU -- we're surprisingly rigid at 87% to 90% continuous.) We're anomalous, which kinda proves the point. What is ironic about your statement is that t2 CPU allocations are massively oversubscribed in the same way. (but far more aggressively!)

msravi 11y ago

I'm actually contemplating moving out of AWS to DO. I signed up for a 1-year m3.medium reserved instance with AWS (Singapore region) sometime in May when the reserved instance cost was ~$50/month (it's now $35/month but I'm stuck with their old rate). This doesn't include bandwidth and IO requests. I might understand charging separately for bandwidth, but IO requests? I end up making between 75M to 95M IO requests, and it adds a good $8 or so to my bill. Plus, there's EBS which for 60GB (not SSD!) adds another $6. So all in all, for ~$65 I'm getting a single core, 3.75GB RAM, 60GB storage, and am stuck with their old pricing for a year, whereas with DO for $40 I can get 2 cores, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD and no "IO request" costs! It's DO as soon as my 1-year is done.

josegonzalez 11y ago
IO requests on ebs-backed volumes go across the network, so I guess they are charging for internal bandwidth in some sense.
jamiesonbecker 11y ago
EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached. DO is still a better deal overall. For crazy dynamic workloads with moderate bandwidth usage, AWS makes good financial sense. Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal. (As are DynamoDB, Redshift, Lambda, and Kinesis, but these can get expensive fast.) AWS really has simply awesome technology, and they can afford to charge what they want for it, and I do believe they strike a pretty good balance most of the time. Also, the Free Tier is really very nice and fair. I'd just like to see the cost model get a bit more transparent and a bit lower in fees, especially on the low end.
- msravi 11y ago
  > EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached I didn't know that. Thank you! > Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal I agree. Which is why I'm going to continue using S3 for my daily backups but move to DO for compute.
ersoft 11y ago
Did you check out Google Cloud ? I moved all my company's instances to them and I ended up cheaper than on Vultr (similar pricing with DO), while also benefiting to more features (storage, mysql, etc) and better uptime. For 28$/month you can get a similar instances as on amazon (1CPU and 3.75GB RAM) and 60GB SSD is another 10$. 60GB standard storage is 2.40$. I'm impressed that Google Cloud is adding a couple of new features every month and I can see them a strong AWS competitor soon.

frik 11y ago

Are there any dedicated server hosters that can compete with AWS/DO in pricing and flexible web interface? (I heard good things about Hetzner, but I would need something in US).