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I adore DO. They’re seriously underrated. I love how they’ll just give you a server and say here, have at it. No abstractions, no fancy crap, just get out of my

I adore DO. They’re seriously underrated. I love how they’ll just give you a server and say here, have at it. No abstractions, no fancy crap, just get out of my way and let me do my thing.

eduction 3y ago
I went to DO's site due to your comment and I don't see anywhere where I can just get a server. Do you mean a VPS/Droplet? (I'm looking under Products and Solutions.)
- gregsadetsky 3y ago
  Not GP, but yes -- Droplets are DigitalOcean's "servers" (virtual, but nonetheless). You boot one up in less than 30 seconds, and get ssh access to it almost immediately. It's very BS-free.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  The other commenter was correct - I meant a droplet. Should have been more explicit, apologies. But yeah if you're looking to learn how to work with backends, going through a droplet set up is by far the best way to get started IMO.
justsid 3y ago
I wish I could say the same. My ISP and DO have absolutely terrible peering, unfortunately a lot of our internal stuff is hosted there. It’s always fun to git push/pull with 40kb/s on a gigabit connection.
- masklinn 3y ago
  Maybe you could VPN to or proxy through a box with good peering to you and DO?
  - aidos 3y ago
    When I’ve run into this in the past Cloudflare Warp has been a bit of a saviour. It’s a hassle free way to flick a switch and follow a different path over the network.
- abwizz 3y ago
  wow! sub mbps indicates that there is indeed no peering at all (political issues?) but just a transit connection via an overloaded carryall. collect some evidence, maybe someone wants to do something about it.
JanSt 3y ago
I'm using Digital Ocean App platform, which does pretty much everything for me. It's very simple to use. I can run my app as a single developer without caring about infrastructure for 99% of the time.
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  Do they offer authentication/authorization? This is the one thing I need in every app and don't want to do myself.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    I've been using Supabase for authentication/authorization in my recent side project. The main app is node/express running on Digital Ocean and it connects to directly to the Supabase hosted Postgres for most operations, but then uses the Supabase auth API for auth related stuff. Saves a lot of time sending password reset emails etc and the entire project costs less than $5/mo in hosting costs.
  - okhuman 3y ago
    Would you consider a project like https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 for the authentication side? Missing anything?
    - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
      No I would not. I don't like self hosting anything that requires its own process. And if I did decide to self host I would choose a more mature project. This is a very young one man project delegating the heavy lifting to another one man project. And it doesn't appear to support social logins.
      - okhuman 3y ago
        thanks for the feedback.
  - 3y ago
vasco 3y ago
Same! I've had my first server there for 10 years now. They added a lot of stuff in the meantime, they have AWS-like things you can do. But in terms of launching a VM that just works, they are a great choice.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  Yeah I hadn't seen those newer features until recently, the one-click deployments are super cool.
yard2010 3y ago
I love their high value content about dev ops, I have learned most of what I know in this field tinkering with a VPS with their great tutorials on how to set up stuff.
- brightball 3y ago
  They filled the Slicehost vacuum nicely in this area. That's where I got my start in running my own servers about 15 years ago and the tutorials were the driving factor.
- xp84 3y ago
  Seriously! They have an amazing article I followed one time to set up a k8s cluster to run any container I wanted with full automatic ssl provisioning/management and dns. Make a quick little yml file that includes what subdomain it wants to be and kubectl apply. The cluster was like $100 a month all-in and performed like a beast at huge traffic levels, and all I did was follow a tutorial. I know that’s probably pretty easy for many, but I was pretty new to k8s and it felt like magic.
dbingham 3y ago
I love DO for projects where I don't need control. For my side project, I eventually migrated to AWS after running into a lot of issues with DO. Things like they don't give you the postgres root user on their managed postgres. And I ran into issues trying to capture the deployments in code. Their terraform providers are pretty good, but still leave something to be desired. For all its many warts, I'm much happier back on AWS. It did end up more expensive, but it's worth it for the fine grained control in my case. But I spent the last 5 years as a DevOps/SRE, so... uh... I'm picky.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  That's interesting, because granular control is why I enjoy DO, although I'm thinking about it from the server perspective. They set up a machine, give me root access, and that's literally it. I set up my own ssh keys, firewalls, and there's no additional abstraction that I have to learn. I might just be reminiscing because right now I'm on a team where we're writing terraform/helm/k8s in GCP and it makes me want to cry myself to sleep each night lol.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  Those are good things to know. I’ve been wondering about their managed databases recently, so I’ll keep that in mind. I’m nowhere near as picky as you are, but maybe I’ll need to be at some point. As it is I mostly just build stuff and send it to the internet. If it builds and it does what I expected, I’m pretty happy! I don’t often need anything too special.
bjord 3y ago
historically, I've used Vultr, but I don't see anyone talking about it—I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on them? (I've been happy, but then again my usage has been exceedingly basic)
- tedchs 3y ago
  I've used Vultr for several years (hobby projects) with no issues. My favorite feature is having a BGP session from my VM, which is unusual among cloud providers. I have an AS and am able to advertise my own IPs from multiple Vultr instances (anycast).
  - LtdJorge 3y ago
    How do you get an AS?
- creeble 3y ago
  Have used both DO and Vultr for years. Put simply, DO is better, but Vultr isn’t terrible. Higher number of outages at Vultr over 5 years, but none longer than a few hours. I can’t remember the last DO outage lasting more than a few minutes. Experienced a Vultr routing problem that lasted several hours; they communicated about it, but it was still a long time to fix. DO once did an auto-migration of a server to another cluster with an attendant outage that lasted a few minutes at most. No IP changes, completely transparent.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I agree. I can either abstract with the app platform or kubernetes, or I can go straight into the box myself and do whatever needs doing. It has been a real pleasure. I think fly’s tooling feels better than doctl, but the infrastructure is incomparable at the end of the day. doctl has improved over time too, and with added pressure from newcomers I don’t doubt that it’ll continue to improve.
apple4ever 3y ago
I really love DO except for one thing - you can't run your own firewall/router there (like opnSense). Really hard to link systems together.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
I find myself going to DO docs on various setup things even when I'm not using said thing on DO (although I'm also a DO customer, and love them for the reasons you've stated).

I adore DO. They’re seriously underrated. I love how they’ll just give you a server and say here, have at it. No abstractions, no fancy crap, just get out of my way and let me do my thing.

eduction 3y ago

I went to DO's site due to your comment and I don't see anywhere where I can just get a server. Do you mean a VPS/Droplet? (I'm looking under Products and Solutions.)

gregsadetsky 3y ago
Not GP, but yes -- Droplets are DigitalOcean's "servers" (virtual, but nonetheless). You boot one up in less than 30 seconds, and get ssh access to it almost immediately. It's very BS-free.
danielvaughn 3y ago
The other commenter was correct - I meant a droplet. Should have been more explicit, apologies. But yeah if you're looking to learn how to work with backends, going through a droplet set up is by far the best way to get started IMO.

justsid 3y ago

I wish I could say the same. My ISP and DO have absolutely terrible peering, unfortunately a lot of our internal stuff is hosted there. It’s always fun to git push/pull with 40kb/s on a gigabit connection.

masklinn 3y ago
Maybe you could VPN to or proxy through a box with good peering to you and DO?
- aidos 3y ago
  When I’ve run into this in the past Cloudflare Warp has been a bit of a saviour. It’s a hassle free way to flick a switch and follow a different path over the network.
abwizz 3y ago
wow! sub mbps indicates that there is indeed no peering at all (political issues?) but just a transit connection via an overloaded carryall. collect some evidence, maybe someone wants to do something about it.

JanSt 3y ago

I'm using Digital Ocean App platform, which does pretty much everything for me. It's very simple to use. I can run my app as a single developer without caring about infrastructure for 99% of the time.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago
Do they offer authentication/authorization? This is the one thing I need in every app and don't want to do myself.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  I've been using Supabase for authentication/authorization in my recent side project. The main app is node/express running on Digital Ocean and it connects to directly to the Supabase hosted Postgres for most operations, but then uses the Supabase auth API for auth related stuff. Saves a lot of time sending password reset emails etc and the entire project costs less than $5/mo in hosting costs.
- okhuman 3y ago
  Would you consider a project like https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 for the authentication side? Missing anything?
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    No I would not. I don't like self hosting anything that requires its own process. And if I did decide to self host I would choose a more mature project. This is a very young one man project delegating the heavy lifting to another one man project. And it doesn't appear to support social logins.
    - okhuman 3y ago
      thanks for the feedback.
- 3y ago

vasco 3y ago

Same! I've had my first server there for 10 years now. They added a lot of stuff in the meantime, they have AWS-like things you can do. But in terms of launching a VM that just works, they are a great choice.

danielvaughn 3y ago
Yeah I hadn't seen those newer features until recently, the one-click deployments are super cool.

yard2010 3y ago

I love their high value content about dev ops, I have learned most of what I know in this field tinkering with a VPS with their great tutorials on how to set up stuff.

brightball 3y ago
They filled the Slicehost vacuum nicely in this area. That's where I got my start in running my own servers about 15 years ago and the tutorials were the driving factor.
xp84 3y ago
Seriously! They have an amazing article I followed one time to set up a k8s cluster to run any container I wanted with full automatic ssl provisioning/management and dns. Make a quick little yml file that includes what subdomain it wants to be and kubectl apply. The cluster was like $100 a month all-in and performed like a beast at huge traffic levels, and all I did was follow a tutorial. I know that’s probably pretty easy for many, but I was pretty new to k8s and it felt like magic.

dbingham 3y ago

I love DO for projects where I don't need control. For my side project, I eventually migrated to AWS after running into a lot of issues with DO. Things like they don't give you the postgres root user on their managed postgres. And I ran into issues trying to capture the deployments in code. Their terraform providers are pretty good, but still leave something to be desired. For all its many warts, I'm much happier back on AWS. It did end up more expensive, but it's worth it for the fine grained control in my case. But I spent the last 5 years as a DevOps/SRE, so... uh... I'm picky.

danielvaughn 3y ago
That's interesting, because granular control is why I enjoy DO, although I'm thinking about it from the server perspective. They set up a machine, give me root access, and that's literally it. I set up my own ssh keys, firewalls, and there's no additional abstraction that I have to learn. I might just be reminiscing because right now I'm on a team where we're writing terraform/helm/k8s in GCP and it makes me want to cry myself to sleep each night lol.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
Those are good things to know. I’ve been wondering about their managed databases recently, so I’ll keep that in mind. I’m nowhere near as picky as you are, but maybe I’ll need to be at some point. As it is I mostly just build stuff and send it to the internet. If it builds and it does what I expected, I’m pretty happy! I don’t often need anything too special.

bjord 3y ago

historically, I've used Vultr, but I don't see anyone talking about it—I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on them? (I've been happy, but then again my usage has been exceedingly basic)

tedchs 3y ago
I've used Vultr for several years (hobby projects) with no issues. My favorite feature is having a BGP session from my VM, which is unusual among cloud providers. I have an AS and am able to advertise my own IPs from multiple Vultr instances (anycast).
- LtdJorge 3y ago
  How do you get an AS?
creeble 3y ago
Have used both DO and Vultr for years. Put simply, DO is better, but Vultr isn’t terrible. Higher number of outages at Vultr over 5 years, but none longer than a few hours. I can’t remember the last DO outage lasting more than a few minutes. Experienced a Vultr routing problem that lasted several hours; they communicated about it, but it was still a long time to fix. DO once did an auto-migration of a server to another cluster with an attendant outage that lasted a few minutes at most. No IP changes, completely transparent.

steve_adams_86 3y ago

I agree. I can either abstract with the app platform or kubernetes, or I can go straight into the box myself and do whatever needs doing. It has been a real pleasure. I think fly’s tooling feels better than doctl, but the infrastructure is incomparable at the end of the day. doctl has improved over time too, and with added pressure from newcomers I don’t doubt that it’ll continue to improve.

apple4ever 3y ago

I really love DO except for one thing - you can't run your own firewall/router there (like opnSense). Really hard to link systems together.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

I find myself going to DO docs on various setup things even when I'm not using said thing on DO (although I'm also a DO customer, and love them for the reasons you've stated).