11 ms·

The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

253 points by beigeotter 13y ago

strick 13y ago
Just an anecdote, but I recently launched a little side project and DigitalOcean crushed EC2 and Rackspace Cloud when I did some benchmarking. The low cost is appreciated but was NOT a factor in my decision.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  So, which one did you pick, and why? EC2 and Rackspace have a greater range of service than all the other guys (storage on demand, snapshots, private networks etc...), but at a very significant price difference.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
conesus 13y ago
NewsBlur is mentioned in the article, but I cannot overstate how positive my experience with DigitalOcean has been. I'm stressing their biggest machines and spinning up dozens of differently configured boxes and they've handled it swimmingly well. Between the price and the performance differences, I'm glad I switched. I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.
- timdorr 13y ago
  How is their network performance in your experience? I think that's the only place I've found them deficient compared to EC2 or others.
  - conesus 13y ago
    Network performance is fine, network reliability is the one you need to watch out for. I'm still working on getting some automated script to detect longer than expected timeouts through HAProxy and then issue a VM reboot through DO's API. It happens often enough that if I experience intermittent downtime, I turn to HAProxy's stats before looking at my munin graphs. But these things will resolve and ease in time. Bleeding edge is well named.
    - zagi 13y ago
      We are using a Cisco based network and working closely with them to build a resilient network architecture. We've already encountered a number of bugs within Cisco's platform that have surfaced and are working closely with their TAC to escalate and resolve them permanently not only for DigitalOcean but all providers world wide.
      - easytiger 13y ago
        FYI I;'ve no idea to whom you are referring when you say "we"
        oblio 13y ago
        I'm guessing he's a Digital Ocean employee :)
        antman 13y ago
        I thought he was NSA
        efdee 13y ago
        He's CEO, bitch.
        oblio 13y ago
        If he's just the CEO then he's an employee :)
- jenius 13y ago
  swimmingly well, hah, hah
glanotte 13y ago
I switched my personal projects from linode to digital ocean, for pricing but the performance is out of this world. The pricing allows me to run 4-5 of my projects for the same cost where I was at times maxing out the low-grade linode box that I had. I later switched all my office's projects there from AWS and cut costs by over 85%. I also saw a significant performance bump allowing me to reduce the number of machines that I had active. I cannot overstate how pleased I have been, their APIs compete with EC2, their performance is better than what I have seen on any competitor. I am one very pleased customer. My _only_ complaint is that they aren't delivering on features at the rate they previously were. Though, after reading this article, I can understand a little better as to why.
- raiyu 13y ago
  You hit the nail on the head =] The growth has been fantastic and we are super excited. Unfortunately managing it requires as much work as engineering new features. The good news is we've been hiring and growing the team and we're hopeful we'll get back to our regular development schedule in the next 2 months after we've gotten everyone up to speed and worked out some of the speed bumps. =]
jonstjohn 13y ago
Recently tried out DigitalOcean for a couple of small projects and already noticed some network reliability issues. My droplet was un-accessible for a couple of hours (at least) yesterday. Fortunately, it was for a non-production project and they were able to restore it within about a 1/2 hour. Verdict is still out for me, although I suspect that reliability will improve with time. I'm keeping production at Linode.
- JesseObrien 13y ago
  I noticed the same thing when I initially switched. I actually had them lose the box I was on, and the backups associated with it. They apologized and indicated it was an issue at the datacenter that they didn't have much control over. They gave me a really nice bit of credit on my account and I've since had no problems. I'm a fan of the pricing as well as their support.
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    I'm amazed you stuck with a host that lost your data. That would be a complete deal breaker for me; I've never lost so much as a byte with Linode over six years.
    - sondh 13y ago
      They lose my entire VPS too but I always think it's my job to backup my data (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra). And they did credit me for their fault so I think it's fair enough.
      - kawsper 13y ago
        > (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra). They lost that as well in this case.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
ahulak 13y ago
I've used them for a few personal projects. I've loved everything so far.
rtehfm 13y ago
I first found digital ocean on lowendbox when they were opening and even though I only host side projects on there, I've never had a problem with them. I was never aware of their performance when compared to Linode and Rackspace until that one comparison on HN several months ago. With that being said, from their expansion from 10,000 instances when I first signed up to over 200,000 today, I have been, thoroughly, impressed with their servers and overall operation.
jtchang 13y ago
I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment. How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity. I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure. EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.
- isalmon 13y ago
  I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.
  - Vieira 13y ago
    Support is quick to reply but often there is nothing they can do. I've tried contacting regarding both technical problems and billing issues and in both occasions they couldn't do nothing to help.
  - bifrost 13y ago
    Wait, you lose connectivity or the VM goes down? They're very different things...
    - isalmon 13y ago
      VM loses connectivity. When I try to ssh - it times out. Also can't connect to anything FROM that VM.
  - gcr 13y ago
    Are you speaking about linode or digitalocean?
    - isalmon 13y ago
      Digital Ocean
mdesq 13y ago
I moved everything I had at Linode over to DigitalOcean as well and performance has been excellent. I loved Linode's stability but their response to the recent security incident really pissed me off. On DigitalOcean, I have seen briefly the network issues mentioned by others, but things have been more stable the last month or so. That said, one production server I work with on RackSpace was completely unavailable yesterday for nearly 5 hours, so paying more money doesn't necessarily give you better uptime. Just that one outage put DigitalOcean ahead in availability for my systems over the last 6 months. Is there any reasonably simple framework for replicating across cloud providers?
- raiyu 13y ago
  Have you integrated something like Puppet or Chef into your workflow to ease the pain of spinning up specific servers such as app, db, workers, etc.?
  - mdesq 13y ago
    We're actually working on that now.
Killswitch 13y ago
I've switched all my stuff from Linode and previous other hosting providers all to DIgitalOcean about 6 months ago and haven't been happier. Great group of guys there too.
- mitchwainer 13y ago
  Thank you for your kind words. We love you! =]
  - Killswitch 13y ago
    Oh Mitch, you really know how to make a guy blush.
dgl 13y ago
I want to like DigitalOcean but it seems their attitude to security is rather lax, see e.g. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3667114-generate-ssh-host-keys-for-new-droplet http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... which they said they'd look at in February but haven't addressed.
- raiyu 13y ago
  This was resolved, thanks for highlighting it, need to get this uservoice entry updated. Also we launched two factor auth recently. We take security very seriously. Thanks
  - dgl 13y ago
    It doesn't look resolved to me, check the key fingerprint on any Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server droplet: ECDSA key fingerprint is 97:d7:21:81:9b:77:34:bb:f1:8e:86:25:b0:47:6b:ff. Also: -rw------- 1 root root 227 Apr 25 2012 ssh_host_ecdsa_key
    - pfg 13y ago
      I can confirm this on a Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created 15 days ago.
      - dpe82 13y ago
        Seems fixed on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created today.
        raiyu 13y ago
        There were three images that didn't like to regenerate host keys on their own when they were missing on the initial boot and we've update them today so it should all be cleared up now. Thanks!
dreen 13y ago
Im not convinced meteoric is the best term for growth. Meteors usually fall down (relative to Earth)
- akkartik 13y ago
  The Greek root actually means 'lofty'. I love etymology: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm
  - dubfan 13y ago
    Hence why the term "meteorology" refers to the study of the weather than the study of meteors.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      And a "meteor" is something that's "suspended in the heavens".
corford 13y ago
About 4 months ago I moved a mail server from a 2GB Linode instance (london) to a 4GB DO instance (amsterdam) and overall I've been very happy with them. No major outages, the cost saving is huge and I/O performance is great. The only negative so far is network reliability. Every once in a while my monitoring stuff fails to establish a connection to the DO box. It's transient though and usually connectivity comes back within 2 to 5 minutes. The box is running a low traffic mail server so it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to worry about yet. Other than that, I'm a happy bunny.
mwcampbell 13y ago
I've played with DigitalOcean some. But I've kept my main VPS on Linode, and also recently recommended Linode for a group that I'm peripherally involved with. Using SSDs for multi-tenant virtualized servers seems like a good idea to me. My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about. However, I have the following reservations about DigitalOcean: 1. No IPv6 yet AFAIK. I figured that would be a priority given the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, particularly in Amsterdam. 2. Not all resource allocations are proportional to the price or amount of RAM. On Linode, a 4 GB VPS is 4 times as much as a 1 GB VPS in every way. On DigitalOcean, a 2 GB VPS only has 2x as much CPU, 2x as much storage, and 3x as much bandwidth as a 512 MB VPS. Don't get me wrong; the prices are great. It just doesn't seem like a logical way to allocate resources from a pool.
- zaphoyd 13y ago
  I asked them about IPv6 in January and they said "coming later this year". I'll certainly give them a closer look when that happens.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  > My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about. Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm limited in my experience, but I believe that's not entirely the case. Modern SAN controllers are optimized for very consistent latency on spinning platter disks, even under heavy load. The big benefit that I see in SSD-backed SANs is increased I/O bandwidth.
kawsper 13y ago
I tried to make the switch, but found the network to be too unstable. I have several servers on Linode, that communicates over the internal network (PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, Beanstalk etc.) and a bunch of app-servers. If their line of communication is broken, nothing works. Now I only use my server at DigitalOcean as routing traffic when I am travelling.
sondh 13y ago
The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...
- Afforess 13y ago
  I've also had the pingdom monitoring on a droplet for the last 2 months and the only downtime I've been alerted to was my fault. Maybe it's on your end?
  - sondh 13y ago
    I used the LAMP stack (in beta) with a low traffic site running PHP5 + MySQL5. Nothing too fancy.
    - Afforess 13y ago
      I'm using a 1gb droplet, ubuntu 12.10 with a LEMP stack, PHP5 and MySQL 5 for a low traffic site (Xenforo-based forum) as well. Maybe the difference is nginx vs Apache? edit: I also added an additional 1gb as swap space, which helped prevent my mysql instance from falling over with low memory at times.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      Apache defaults to using prefork on Linux. Prefork is pretty much Apache-speak for "please munch all my memory and then lock up if more than a handful of people turn up at once". Nginx or Lighttpd + PHP-FPM behave almost as badly if you choose dynamic mode and don't pick the right values.
- xur17 13y ago
  I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?
dergachev 13y ago
What's even more exciting is that there's a Vagrant provider for DigitalOcean! I tried it yesterday and it seems to actually work: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean Basically you put your DO api key in your Vagrant file, and then running "vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean" spins up a new ubuntu VM and runs your chef/puppet provisioner code on them. It's awesome! It uses rsync to mirror your vagrant project directory to /vagrant, which is a actually better workflow for some use cases (eg hosting) than virtualbox shared folders.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
  You just sold me on trying it.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  OK, now I have to try Vagrant, too!
- eknuth 13y ago
  It doesn't seem to work with puppet. Only chef: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37 https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37
  - eknuth 13y ago
    Actually, I reloaded the issue and it was closed. Looks like digital ocean wins :)
dergachev 13y ago
Does anybody know if they offer anything equivalent to HOSTNAME.herokuapp.com? I'm just testing them now, and I'm not ready to point a real domain at them yet.
- masonhensley 13y ago
  Do you not have a domain of any sort? It would seem trivial to point TESTAPP.degachevdomain.com to the IP address of the server. Else, just go to the IP.
  - dergachev 13y ago
    I have a bunch of domains, but I'm using DO for temporary apps, and would like the DNS records to be automatically created/destroyed along with the droplets.
    - rgbrgb 13y ago
      I think this is a great idea. In many ways they're positioned to become a more flexible/performant version of Heroku. On the complexity scale from Heroku to AWS, they definitely sit right in the middle. It will be interesting to see which direction they tend towards as they add features. Personally I want a version of Heroku with the price/performance of digital ocean. In other words, by default you could use it like Heroku but it would allow you to SSH into machines and customize your software/configuration when you ran into problems. Maybe DO could offer a load balancer that would make it easy to deploy horizontally scaled application servers really easily. A nice DSL to describe the node configuration would go a long way... I suppose this is kind of what Vagrant is solving but they're approaching it from the development perspective, not deployment.
ibudiallo 13y ago
Digital Ocean is an amazing service. The only thing missing is private IPs. Once they implement it I will be making a full switch from linode.
bifrost 13y ago
I like the idea and concept of DO, but they don't support non-Linux which is pretty lame considering they are using KVM which can run a bunch of different stuff. I'm also curious how they do volume management, but these are just technical details :) I'll also point out that a regular FreeBSD/NetBSD network install can be done in under 55 seconds, so thats not really a major feat to do when you're just copying images around. But, they've productized it all very well so I'm happy to see someone taking a chunk out of EC2.
mbesto 13y ago
Given how cheap the price is, I don't think they have a sustainable business model. As far as I can see, there is nothing technically different from their model that allows their service to benefit from any type of economies (of scale/scope) in order to stay competitive. So then my overall question is - how can they offer better service and better hardware (i.e. more expensive) at a cheaper rate? I'm genuinely curious. I'll stick with Linode until the company is more established.
- conesus 13y ago
  Modern machines is my guess. Many other cloud providers and hosting companies are running machines from a few years ago. I don't believe the price has stayed competitive to the power, so DO is effectively arbitraging the price difference between 2010 machines and 2013 machines. That and their API makes it really easy to spin up more machines than you need, leading to some dead weight that doesn't harm your neighbors.
  - wmf 13y ago
    This doesn't sound sustainable. Four years from now, DigitalOcean will have a mix of machines just like the other hosting providers. (Google Compute Engine is in the same position because right now they only run on Sandy Bridge.)
    - conesus 13y ago
      DigitalOcean is my fourth host in four years. I just spent two years with a company inexplicably named Reliable Hosting Services before I switched. Switching hosting providers is surprisingly easy, since I just replicate out my DBs and then eventually switch the primaries over to the new host. My gut tells me that DigitalOcean has at least a couple years until I have to even think about comparing to other hosts again.
      - mitchwainer 13y ago
        We're happy to have you on board! =]
rpedela 13y ago
I am curious if there are any IOPS comparisons between DigitalOcean and real hardware (spinning disks)? Currently we run our Postgres instances on EC2, but are looking to move to get better IOPS. The question is: SSD-based VMs or real hardware? Cost is also a factor which is why DigitalOcean is a contender.
- masonhensley 13y ago
  Check these out: http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-performance-benchmarks/ http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-perf... http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121 http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Thanks but those are not what I am looking for. Linode and AWS run on VMs just like DO. The question is not SSD VM vs disk VM. It is SSD VM vs disk non-VM (real hardware).
- STRiDEX 13y ago
  iops are available on serverbear http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Thanks. This helps!
- raiyu 13y ago
  Depending on the size of your existing DB and the workload getting a larger sized VM - 16+GB you should see significant performance improvement. Because it's hourly you can spin up and test and if it doesn't suit your needs will be a minimal charge. We also made a promo code : NEWSYC10 - so you can get a $10 credit to test with before incurring any charges.
btipling 13y ago
I believe "meteoric" implies a quick fall. A light that burns brightly, but disappears quickly. Not sure the data warrants the use of that adjective in this context.
garraeth 13y ago
I've been on DO for several months now and love them. And as far as reliability, I've had binarycanary pointed at my sites for about a month now with one outage that lasted about a minute and then resolved itself. To me, for the price/benefits, that's amazing. One other thing people rarely mention with hosting, that's SUPER important to me, are the FAQs/Docs, and DO really comes through in that area imo.
- beigeotter 13y ago
  Hi Garraeth! Thank so much for the shoutout about the docs. We are very focused on building up our developer community (with our IRC channel #digitalocean, forum, and tutorials) and growing as an educational resource. If you ever have any additional article requests, please feel free to send them to etel@digitalocean.com
rjonesx 13y ago
I love DO, favorite hosting environment ever. Still use Linode for some stuff, but only because I don't want to go through the headache of moving it.
btb 13y ago
Inspired by the article I signed up and spun up a 512 mb droplet. It eventually came up(although took alot longer than the advertised 55 secs). Felt very sluggish, or maybe they run alot of startup scripts on boot? I tried running "top" and it ran a whole bunch of unfamiliar looking commands using 96% CPU. So I destroyed the droplet and wanted to try a 8gb/4core droplet. In the interface it says it was created in 173 seconds. But now 10 mins later I still cant ssh or ping the given IP. So while the pricing is definately good, and I like the idea of SSD-only storage, my first half-hour impression of the service was that it seems a bit rough around the edges and not something I would want to bet my company's hosting on.
- Afforess 13y ago
  Just to make sure you didn't miss a simple step (like I have before...) after you spin up an instance, they email you the ssh login details. Did you check your email?
- perryh2 13y ago
  I create new droplets from time to time and I've never had much of an issue provisioning new instances.
- rcsorensen 13y ago
  I had the same thing. Logged in to their web console with the details they sent and restarted the host. It looks like the network didn't initialize correctly on the first go.
freework 13y ago
I switched to these guys after my reserved instance ran out at AWS. I was paying $50 a month for EC2 small, which was super slow. Since switching to DigitalOcean, not only am I paying $10 a month, but my site feels much much faster now. DO wins because IO is very fast on the SSDs. By comparison, Amazon's EBS is glacial.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Local SSDs are always going to beat out iSCSI (which is what Amazon EBS' are under the hood).
PascalW 13y ago
My experience has also been great so far, superb performance and great pricing. It's also very nice to see them roll out new features on a pretty quick phase.
pavs 13y ago
Happy Do customer, really nothing bad to say about them (yet). Been with them for couple of months now. Reminds me of slicehost, but with much much better price.
mhd 13y ago
Has the quality of their billing system risen, too?
pfg 13y ago
I've been using DigitalOcean to host a GitLab instance for a while now (20GB Droplet) and it's been working great. I ran into two small issues so far. First of all, for some reason the traffic from my home connection is routed through New York (I'm in Europe using a Droplet in Amsterdam), resulting in a ~150ms RTT (I usually get 30-40ms to Amsterdam). Since this only happens with my home connection and it's fine in the office, my ISP might be the one to blame for this. Anyway, I've opened a ticket, so maybe they can fix it. The other weird thing is how they hande kernels/kernel versions. You can't simply update your kernel through apt (or anything like that) - you have to select the kernel version from a gigantic drop-down (containing multiple kernel versions for every distribution you can run) in their UI. Plus, adding new kernels seems to be a manual process for them, since it takes a while until updated kernels become available. I'm sure they're working on a better solution for that though. All in all, they offer great service for an even better price, so I'm happy with my choice.
- PascalW 13y ago
  Yes, the way kernels are managed is also something that annoys me. But it seems they're working on it: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader- http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea....
  - ics 13y ago
    Actually reading the comments further might give you a more somber impression of what "working on it" is in this case. That said, I'll stay optimistic since my work doesn't depend on it and I'm happy to have another super cheap Arch instance.
- hnriot 13y ago
  The traffic is routed through NY to make it easier for the NSA.
rschmitty 13y ago
Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?
- Afforess 13y ago
  Probably, as the $5 instance is only 1 core. You might be able to squeeze more on if you aren't using much memory, or don't mind adding swap space (ssd swap is fast enough for me...)
- rozap 13y ago
  It depends on a lot of things. Try load testing it. I modified bees with machine guns to run on DigitalOcean instead of AWS, so you can load test to your heart's desire. it's here: https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns
- pfg 13y ago
  I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 503516 488644 14872 0 9036 203300 -/+ buffers/cache: 276308 227208 Swap: 1048572 153704 894868 Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd recommend adding a swapfile so you don't run out of memory at some point - since they're using SSDs, swapping is not that bad.)
  - rschmitty 13y ago
    Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?
    - pfg 13y ago
      GitLab is using puma (configured to 1 worker/8 threads in my case), and I'm running nginx in front of it. Sidekiq seems to be eating the biggest chunk of my memory (~20%), so I might be able to save some memory by tuning that.
rorrr2 13y ago
Could you publish non-anonymized SSD reliability data? When Google did publish their extensive HDD reliability study they removed all brand/model names, so it's pretty useless for consumers.
- wmf 13y ago
  I suspect such data wouldn't be that useful even if it included model names because by the time you have good data on a model it's old enough that it's no longer price competitive. Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Netflix is already deploying the brand new Crucial m500, although their monkeys probably care more about cost than reliability.
  - derefr 13y ago
    Sure, information on particular models is pretty useless, but dredging the data might turn up model series that tend to outperform other series/other brands.
KenCochrane 13y ago
I have been using Digital Ocean as a sandbox for playing with Docker, and it has been great. I can spin up a server in less then 1 minute, install the Docker dependencies, and be up in running in no time. I do what I need to do, and then I spin it down if I don't need it anymore. I wrote down my notes on how to get Docker running on Digital Ocean, if anyone wants to play with it. There is even a promo code for a $10 credit for new signups. http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digital-ocean/ http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digita... I had a couple of issues when I first tried using them, but I was able to get help pretty quickly on a Saturday morning no less. I haven't used them for anything production quality yet, I have most of that stuff on EC2 and Rackspace right now, but I hope to start moving some smaller projects to DO as they come up. Someone else mentioned this already as well, but the SSD is so nice compared to EC2's EBS, so if you are doing anything with lots of I/O then it is a must have.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  Thanks. I was up in running in no time following those directions. Oddly enough the first few tries running hello world came back with 502 errors: > root@docker:/proc# docker run base /bin/echo hello world Pulling repository base from https://index.docker.io/v1 https://index.docker.io/v1 2013/06/13 22:19:37 HTTP code: 502 After about 2 minutes it just started working. Was that a networking hiccup and on which side?
  - julien421 13y ago
    This was a temporary problem due to a AWS DNS Resolution issue[1], but it seems to be back now. Do you confirm? http://status.aws.amazon.com/ http://status.aws.amazon.com/ [1] 3:42 PM PDT We are investigating DNS resolution issues in the US-EAST-1 Region.
    - shykes 13y ago
      Looks like maybe it should be hosted on Digital Ocean ;)
dear 13y ago
I am a happy user of Digital Ocean. Thumbs up! Wish you all the best!
graue 13y ago
Is anyone else bothered by the vague, overbroad restrictions in DigitalOcean's terms of service? Particularly: "2.5 You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: [..] Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental" Almost anything can be offensive to someone. I compared the Linode and AWS terms of service and neither has anything like this. While none of my own content is by any means extreme, the presence of this provision seems like a red flag and has kept me from switching to DO.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  Wait, people actually read the Terms of Service?
  - grayrest 13y ago
    If you're going to use it for your business it might be a good idea.
  - kGrange 13y ago
    Most "people" don't, but if you're on Hacker News, I'm going to assume you're a little more tech-oriented than most "people." In that case, check out ToS's on the services you use. They're, suprisingly, usually not that long or hard to read.
- aroch 13y ago
  That's pretty standard boilerplate language for a ToS. It essentially protects DO from someone suing them because a client is doing something offensive (like say, running a mail server to email the Goatse pic to as many people as possible)
  - eurleif 13y ago
    Wouldn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... protect them regardless?
esalman 13y ago
Just received the following email from DigitalOcean: Thank You! Today is a very special day for us. As you may or may not have heard, Netcraft released a recent report that details the history of our rapid growth in comparison to other cloud hosting providers. We are extremely humbled by this recognition and cannot thank our customers enough! As we have grown over the past two years, we are continually indebted to our customers for your amazing support and feedback. Without you, DigitalOcean would not even dream of being where it is today. According to Netcraft, over the past six months we've grown 5,084.64% in web-facing computers (instances) and are responsible for 10% of the total growth worldwide. DigitalOcean's more than 50-fold growth makes it the 72nd largest hosting provider in the world by web-facing computers. Last December, we were number 549; even last month we were still 102nd. As your projects and endeavours scale, we will be there with amazing and reliable service, new features, and an unrestrained drive to create the simplest, strongest cloud that you can be proud to call home. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! You have brought us to this point. We cannot wait to keep rising together!
svintus 13y ago
We have started with using DO for our test machines / intrusion detection boxes and were so happy with price/performance/ease of use that we ended up migrating most of our infrastructure over. We now have 45 boxes hosted on DO and couldn't be happier. The network reliability has been phenomenal so far compared to some of the other providers we've dealt with - Rackspace, SoftLayer, VPS.NET, etc.
collinvandyck76 13y ago
I switched from prgmr.com to DO recently simply because of the additional RAM (double) for the same price. I really like prgmr.com, and have been a customer of theirs for years, but the new machine is simply much faster (and the network latency is also much better). Of course, this would probably be true switching to a new VPS provider after a few years of being on the same box. One thing that's unique to DO in this regard, though, is that their onboarding process is super smooth. I was up and running very quickly.
yumraj 13y ago
I'm currently using EC2 with RDS primarily because RDS provides major benefits to a non-DBA like me. Given that I would prefer to keep using RDS, and the network latency etc., any thoughts/advise on how DO-RDS would perform compared to EC2-RDS, with everything being in N.CA/SF Zone and using comparable EC2/DO instances for running my app server? Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision.
- opinologo 13y ago
  >>Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision. I found the benchmarks in http://serverbear.com/ http://serverbear.com/ very reliable
geerlingguy 13y ago
Here are a few benchmarks I ran against DO, Linode, and Hot Drupal (another provider I've used in the past): http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-benchmarks-linode http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-be... I've been very happy with my testing on Digital Ocean; the servers are fast, they remain up as much as any other provider, and the interface/service is great, and is improving every month. The only sore spot is that two times I've had intermittent dropouts—once caused by someone DDoSing another DO site, and the other time for unexplained reasons. (And I know that the dropouts weren't just me, since I was monitoring things with https://servercheck.in/ https://servercheck.in/, which runs partly on Digital Ocean VPSes).
mschalle 13y ago
My one gripe with DigitalOcean is that their customer support leaves a great deal to be desired. For days I've been unable to replicate images across regions (any droplet I try to create gets in a permanent stuck state and can't be killed). I filed a service ticket days ago and was told I'd receive a response shortly but have still heard nothing. I've even sent replies pleading for some recognition that my issue is being worked on, but have received no response and no indication that they are working on my ticket. This does not bode well considering that creating a droplet from an existing image is a major feature of their product, and is not properly working. While I have liked DO when it works and their prices are great, it comes at a cost. In my case that cost is their product not properly functioning and their team seemingly having no intention of fixing my issue.
- Veratyr 13y ago
  As someone who works in (completely unrelated) support, the numerous emails may be a contributing factor to your problem. Most support is done using last contact as the priority. When you send a new email, you're resetting that counter and bumping yourself to the bottom of the queue. This was a problem we had with a /particular/ support system (Kayako) and we've since resolved it (with ZenDesk) but if they're using something silly like Kayako, that might be the reason. Also, if they have a phone number, use it. Not justifying what they do, just trying to help you work them out.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Hmmm, that might explain why Pebble (the smart watch) support had this super passive aggressive sounding "if you keep emailing us about the same issue, we'll put your case to the bottom of the list" instructions. Not the message you really want to be sending your already disgruntled customers - "Do I mail them and check to see if they even got my email which hasn't had any response in two weeks, or will that just put me _another_ two weeks further down their already abysmally slow response queue?".
jsingleton 13y ago
It's a shame that they don't offer Windows as an OS and don't plan to. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2536799-can-i-deploy-windows- http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... I did some testing of .NET on Windows vs mono on Linux and unfortunately mono is just too slow. For the money saved on licenses more would have to be spent on hardware. Licensing is a pain though. Working out what you need and how to pay is non-trivial.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Are you able to elaborate on the testing you did? Did you raise any bug reports over with Mono?
X-Istence 13y ago
The only issue I've had is that the network seems to drop every so often. Using them right now as an OpenVPN end point/IRC client.
mp99e99 13y ago
Congrats, this is a great win for DO.
paul9290 13y ago
Our CTO moved us (sleep.fm & SpeakerBlast) to DigitalOcean a few months ago. We were using GoDaddy so this is definitely a step up!
guelo 13y ago
I'm about to ditch DigitalOcean because I keep experiencing long lags in the ssh terminals. Sometimes when doing things that stress the terminal, like tail-ing a busy log file or running a full-screen app like top or vim, it will hang for minutes.
- mitchwainer 13y ago
  Sorry to hear! Are you still experiencing issues? Feel free to email me directly at mitch@digitalocean.com.
frou_dh 13y ago
They are certainly generous with promos. Just today I got an unsolicited $5 credit and I haven't even burned through the original credit I got for signing up via Twitter.
akurilin 13y ago
Is there a SKU for more disk-heavy workloads like a box running Postgres? I'd love to be able to get more disk space (especially since you guys have SSDs, this will make PG very happy) without the extra CPU and memory. Is that currently possible with Digital Ocean?
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  No. I have spent hours searching for a cloud provider with decent disk space at a "decent" price, and it basically does not exist. The only thing I have been able to find are physical hosts, with all the issues associated with them (40$ for 2 x 1 TB disk at http://ovh.com http://ovh.com).
  - akurilin 13y ago
    Argh, that's too bad, thanks for letting me know. Perhaps something along the lines of Heroku's Postgres hosting would be good?
    - dorfsmay 13y ago
      Heroku is good because they take sysadmin/DBA headaches away from you, but I wouldn't call them cheap. My take on this is that if you want or need to run your own database with a large amount of storage, there are three solutions: - run it in house, which means you now need a redundant link to the internet, server class machines (redundant power supply), etc, etc, etc... Unlikely unless you already have your own data centre - use a VM to which you can add storage (EC2, google, etc...). That is expensive (0.1$/GiB) but typically very reliable (they use redundant physical storage), and flexible (you can move your storage around, rebuild VMs etc...). - use a colo site, or a rent a cheap physical. You get a lot of space for a very reasonable price, but have all the headaches of a physical (storage is only as redundant as you make it, no hardware mirroring/raid'ing, if the storage fails, you've lost your OS as well, and now have to restore from backup, changing OS means renting a second physical, install, transfer data, etc...).
      - 13y ago
opinologo 13y ago
I made a thorough analysis recently and discovered that catalysthost.com would give me the best value for money. I am using a "Trenta" OpenVZ Ubuntu 12.04 machine for $15.99 per month and I am quite happy with the performance, including network performance. This is the spec of the vm: 4 CPU Cores 2GB RAM 512MB vSwap 60GB Storage 2TB Bandwidth @ 1Gbps You can compare similar plans here: http://serverbear.com/1826-trenta-catalysthost#benchmarks http://serverbear.com/1826-trenta-catalysthost#benchmarks http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean
eliben 13y ago
I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  It's an artifact of small figures and small sample sizes generally. Anything which grows geometrically will grow progressively more slowly over time when expressed as a percentage.
- adventured 13y ago
  Incorrect. If you were right, then every provider that was small would be skyrocketing up the usage charts. However, that's numerically impossible. Many smaller providers simply die off or never gain any traction. This time next year, they'll likely be in the top 15 to top 25 on that same list.
  - eliben 13y ago
    Precisely. When a smaller provider goes from 1000 to 50 users, it's a "ZOMG 95% drop!" while only 950 users left, line noise for bigger providers. You're adding another example to my point. Naturally I didn't say that all small numbers always change drastically. But those that do change, appear to be more drastic than larger numbers.

253 points by beigeotter 13y ago

Just an anecdote, but I recently launched a little side project and DigitalOcean crushed EC2 and Rackspace Cloud when I did some benchmarking. The low cost is appreciated but was NOT a factor in my decision.

dorfsmay 13y ago
So, which one did you pick, and why? EC2 and Rackspace have a greater range of service than all the other guys (storage on demand, snapshots, private networks etc...), but at a very significant price difference.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

conesus 13y ago

NewsBlur is mentioned in the article, but I cannot overstate how positive my experience with DigitalOcean has been. I'm stressing their biggest machines and spinning up dozens of differently configured boxes and they've handled it swimmingly well. Between the price and the performance differences, I'm glad I switched. I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.

timdorr 13y ago
How is their network performance in your experience? I think that's the only place I've found them deficient compared to EC2 or others.
- conesus 13y ago
  Network performance is fine, network reliability is the one you need to watch out for. I'm still working on getting some automated script to detect longer than expected timeouts through HAProxy and then issue a VM reboot through DO's API. It happens often enough that if I experience intermittent downtime, I turn to HAProxy's stats before looking at my munin graphs. But these things will resolve and ease in time. Bleeding edge is well named.
  - zagi 13y ago
    We are using a Cisco based network and working closely with them to build a resilient network architecture. We've already encountered a number of bugs within Cisco's platform that have surfaced and are working closely with their TAC to escalate and resolve them permanently not only for DigitalOcean but all providers world wide.
    - easytiger 13y ago
      FYI I;'ve no idea to whom you are referring when you say "we"
      - oblio 13y ago
        I'm guessing he's a Digital Ocean employee :)
        antman 13y ago
        I thought he was NSA
        efdee 13y ago
        He's CEO, bitch.
        oblio 13y ago
        If he's just the CEO then he's an employee :)
jenius 13y ago
swimmingly well, hah, hah

glanotte 13y ago

I switched my personal projects from linode to digital ocean, for pricing but the performance is out of this world. The pricing allows me to run 4-5 of my projects for the same cost where I was at times maxing out the low-grade linode box that I had. I later switched all my office's projects there from AWS and cut costs by over 85%. I also saw a significant performance bump allowing me to reduce the number of machines that I had active. I cannot overstate how pleased I have been, their APIs compete with EC2, their performance is better than what I have seen on any competitor. I am one very pleased customer. My _only_ complaint is that they aren't delivering on features at the rate they previously were. Though, after reading this article, I can understand a little better as to why.

raiyu 13y ago
You hit the nail on the head =] The growth has been fantastic and we are super excited. Unfortunately managing it requires as much work as engineering new features. The good news is we've been hiring and growing the team and we're hopeful we'll get back to our regular development schedule in the next 2 months after we've gotten everyone up to speed and worked out some of the speed bumps. =]

jonstjohn 13y ago

Recently tried out DigitalOcean for a couple of small projects and already noticed some network reliability issues. My droplet was un-accessible for a couple of hours (at least) yesterday. Fortunately, it was for a non-production project and they were able to restore it within about a 1/2 hour. Verdict is still out for me, although I suspect that reliability will improve with time. I'm keeping production at Linode.

JesseObrien 13y ago
I noticed the same thing when I initially switched. I actually had them lose the box I was on, and the backups associated with it. They apologized and indicated it was an issue at the datacenter that they didn't have much control over. They gave me a really nice bit of credit on my account and I've since had no problems. I'm a fan of the pricing as well as their support.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  I'm amazed you stuck with a host that lost your data. That would be a complete deal breaker for me; I've never lost so much as a byte with Linode over six years.
  - sondh 13y ago
    They lose my entire VPS too but I always think it's my job to backup my data (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra). And they did credit me for their fault so I think it's fair enough.
    - kawsper 13y ago
      > (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra). They lost that as well in this case.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]

ahulak 13y ago

I've used them for a few personal projects. I've loved everything so far.

rtehfm 13y ago

I first found digital ocean on lowendbox when they were opening and even though I only host side projects on there, I've never had a problem with them. I was never aware of their performance when compared to Linode and Rackspace until that one comparison on HN several months ago. With that being said, from their expansion from 10,000 instances when I first signed up to over 200,000 today, I have been, thoroughly, impressed with their servers and overall operation.

jtchang 13y ago

I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment. How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity. I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure. EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.

isalmon 13y ago
I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.
- Vieira 13y ago
  Support is quick to reply but often there is nothing they can do. I've tried contacting regarding both technical problems and billing issues and in both occasions they couldn't do nothing to help.
- bifrost 13y ago
  Wait, you lose connectivity or the VM goes down? They're very different things...
  - isalmon 13y ago
    VM loses connectivity. When I try to ssh - it times out. Also can't connect to anything FROM that VM.
- gcr 13y ago
  Are you speaking about linode or digitalocean?
  - isalmon 13y ago
    Digital Ocean

mdesq 13y ago

I moved everything I had at Linode over to DigitalOcean as well and performance has been excellent. I loved Linode's stability but their response to the recent security incident really pissed me off. On DigitalOcean, I have seen briefly the network issues mentioned by others, but things have been more stable the last month or so. That said, one production server I work with on RackSpace was completely unavailable yesterday for nearly 5 hours, so paying more money doesn't necessarily give you better uptime. Just that one outage put DigitalOcean ahead in availability for my systems over the last 6 months. Is there any reasonably simple framework for replicating across cloud providers?

raiyu 13y ago
Have you integrated something like Puppet or Chef into your workflow to ease the pain of spinning up specific servers such as app, db, workers, etc.?
- mdesq 13y ago
  We're actually working on that now.

Killswitch 13y ago

I've switched all my stuff from Linode and previous other hosting providers all to DIgitalOcean about 6 months ago and haven't been happier. Great group of guys there too.

mitchwainer 13y ago
Thank you for your kind words. We love you! =]
- Killswitch 13y ago
  Oh Mitch, you really know how to make a guy blush.

dgl 13y ago

I want to like DigitalOcean but it seems their attitude to security is rather lax, see e.g. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3667114-generate-ssh-host-keys-for-new-droplet http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... which they said they'd look at in February but haven't addressed.

raiyu 13y ago
This was resolved, thanks for highlighting it, need to get this uservoice entry updated. Also we launched two factor auth recently. We take security very seriously. Thanks
- dgl 13y ago
  It doesn't look resolved to me, check the key fingerprint on any Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server droplet: ECDSA key fingerprint is 97:d7:21:81:9b:77:34:bb:f1:8e:86:25:b0:47:6b:ff. Also: -rw------- 1 root root 227 Apr 25 2012 ssh_host_ecdsa_key
  - pfg 13y ago
    I can confirm this on a Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created 15 days ago.
    - dpe82 13y ago
      Seems fixed on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created today.
      - raiyu 13y ago
        There were three images that didn't like to regenerate host keys on their own when they were missing on the initial boot and we've update them today so it should all be cleared up now. Thanks!

dreen 13y ago

Im not convinced meteoric is the best term for growth. Meteors usually fall down (relative to Earth)

akkartik 13y ago
The Greek root actually means 'lofty'. I love etymology: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-met1.htm
- dubfan 13y ago
  Hence why the term "meteorology" refers to the study of the weather than the study of meteors.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    And a "meteor" is something that's "suspended in the heavens".

corford 13y ago

About 4 months ago I moved a mail server from a 2GB Linode instance (london) to a 4GB DO instance (amsterdam) and overall I've been very happy with them. No major outages, the cost saving is huge and I/O performance is great. The only negative so far is network reliability. Every once in a while my monitoring stuff fails to establish a connection to the DO box. It's transient though and usually connectivity comes back within 2 to 5 minutes. The box is running a low traffic mail server so it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to worry about yet. Other than that, I'm a happy bunny.

mwcampbell 13y ago

I've played with DigitalOcean some. But I've kept my main VPS on Linode, and also recently recommended Linode for a group that I'm peripherally involved with. Using SSDs for multi-tenant virtualized servers seems like a good idea to me. My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about. However, I have the following reservations about DigitalOcean: 1. No IPv6 yet AFAIK. I figured that would be a priority given the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, particularly in Amsterdam. 2. Not all resource allocations are proportional to the price or amount of RAM. On Linode, a 4 GB VPS is 4 times as much as a 1 GB VPS in every way. On DigitalOcean, a 2 GB VPS only has 2x as much CPU, 2x as much storage, and 3x as much bandwidth as a 512 MB VPS. Don't get me wrong; the prices are great. It just doesn't seem like a logical way to allocate resources from a pool.

zaphoyd 13y ago
I asked them about IPv6 in January and they said "coming later this year". I'll certainly give them a closer look when that happens.
benjamincburns 13y ago
> My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about. Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm limited in my experience, but I believe that's not entirely the case. Modern SAN controllers are optimized for very consistent latency on spinning platter disks, even under heavy load. The big benefit that I see in SSD-backed SANs is increased I/O bandwidth.

kawsper 13y ago

I tried to make the switch, but found the network to be too unstable. I have several servers on Linode, that communicates over the internal network (PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache, Beanstalk etc.) and a bunch of app-servers. If their line of communication is broken, nothing works. Now I only use my server at DigitalOcean as routing traffic when I am travelling.

sondh 13y ago

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

Afforess 13y ago
I've also had the pingdom monitoring on a droplet for the last 2 months and the only downtime I've been alerted to was my fault. Maybe it's on your end?
- sondh 13y ago
  I used the LAMP stack (in beta) with a low traffic site running PHP5 + MySQL5. Nothing too fancy.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    I'm using a 1gb droplet, ubuntu 12.10 with a LEMP stack, PHP5 and MySQL 5 for a low traffic site (Xenforo-based forum) as well. Maybe the difference is nginx vs Apache? edit: I also added an additional 1gb as swap space, which helped prevent my mysql instance from falling over with low memory at times.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    Apache defaults to using prefork on Linux. Prefork is pretty much Apache-speak for "please munch all my memory and then lock up if more than a handful of people turn up at once". Nginx or Lighttpd + PHP-FPM behave almost as badly if you choose dynamic mode and don't pick the right values.
xur17 13y ago
I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?

dergachev 13y ago

What's even more exciting is that there's a Vagrant provider for DigitalOcean! I tried it yesterday and it seems to actually work: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean Basically you put your DO api key in your Vagrant file, and then running "vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean" spins up a new ubuntu VM and runs your chef/puppet provisioner code on them. It's awesome! It uses rsync to mirror your vagrant project directory to /vagrant, which is a actually better workflow for some use cases (eg hosting) than virtualbox shared folders.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
You just sold me on trying it.
voltagex_ 13y ago
OK, now I have to try Vagrant, too!
eknuth 13y ago
It doesn't seem to work with puppet. Only chef: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37 https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37
- eknuth 13y ago
  Actually, I reloaded the issue and it was closed. Looks like digital ocean wins :)

dergachev 13y ago

Does anybody know if they offer anything equivalent to HOSTNAME.herokuapp.com? I'm just testing them now, and I'm not ready to point a real domain at them yet.

masonhensley 13y ago
Do you not have a domain of any sort? It would seem trivial to point TESTAPP.degachevdomain.com to the IP address of the server. Else, just go to the IP.
- dergachev 13y ago
  I have a bunch of domains, but I'm using DO for temporary apps, and would like the DNS records to be automatically created/destroyed along with the droplets.
  - rgbrgb 13y ago
    I think this is a great idea. In many ways they're positioned to become a more flexible/performant version of Heroku. On the complexity scale from Heroku to AWS, they definitely sit right in the middle. It will be interesting to see which direction they tend towards as they add features. Personally I want a version of Heroku with the price/performance of digital ocean. In other words, by default you could use it like Heroku but it would allow you to SSH into machines and customize your software/configuration when you ran into problems. Maybe DO could offer a load balancer that would make it easy to deploy horizontally scaled application servers really easily. A nice DSL to describe the node configuration would go a long way... I suppose this is kind of what Vagrant is solving but they're approaching it from the development perspective, not deployment.

ibudiallo 13y ago

Digital Ocean is an amazing service. The only thing missing is private IPs. Once they implement it I will be making a full switch from linode.

bifrost 13y ago

I like the idea and concept of DO, but they don't support non-Linux which is pretty lame considering they are using KVM which can run a bunch of different stuff. I'm also curious how they do volume management, but these are just technical details :) I'll also point out that a regular FreeBSD/NetBSD network install can be done in under 55 seconds, so thats not really a major feat to do when you're just copying images around. But, they've productized it all very well so I'm happy to see someone taking a chunk out of EC2.

mbesto 13y ago

Given how cheap the price is, I don't think they have a sustainable business model. As far as I can see, there is nothing technically different from their model that allows their service to benefit from any type of economies (of scale/scope) in order to stay competitive. So then my overall question is - how can they offer better service and better hardware (i.e. more expensive) at a cheaper rate? I'm genuinely curious. I'll stick with Linode until the company is more established.

conesus 13y ago
Modern machines is my guess. Many other cloud providers and hosting companies are running machines from a few years ago. I don't believe the price has stayed competitive to the power, so DO is effectively arbitraging the price difference between 2010 machines and 2013 machines. That and their API makes it really easy to spin up more machines than you need, leading to some dead weight that doesn't harm your neighbors.
- wmf 13y ago
  This doesn't sound sustainable. Four years from now, DigitalOcean will have a mix of machines just like the other hosting providers. (Google Compute Engine is in the same position because right now they only run on Sandy Bridge.)
  - conesus 13y ago
    DigitalOcean is my fourth host in four years. I just spent two years with a company inexplicably named Reliable Hosting Services before I switched. Switching hosting providers is surprisingly easy, since I just replicate out my DBs and then eventually switch the primaries over to the new host. My gut tells me that DigitalOcean has at least a couple years until I have to even think about comparing to other hosts again.
    - mitchwainer 13y ago
      We're happy to have you on board! =]

rpedela 13y ago

I am curious if there are any IOPS comparisons between DigitalOcean and real hardware (spinning disks)? Currently we run our Postgres instances on EC2, but are looking to move to get better IOPS. The question is: SSD-based VMs or real hardware? Cost is also a factor which is why DigitalOcean is a contender.

masonhensley 13y ago
Check these out: http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-performance-benchmarks/ http://stevenyue.com/2013/04/15/linode-vs-digital-ocean-perf... http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121 http://bigjocker.com/wordpress/?p=121
- rpedela 13y ago
  Thanks but those are not what I am looking for. Linode and AWS run on VMs just like DO. The question is not SSD VM vs disk VM. It is SSD VM vs disk non-VM (real hardware).
STRiDEX 13y ago
iops are available on serverbear http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean
- rpedela 13y ago
  Thanks. This helps!
raiyu 13y ago
Depending on the size of your existing DB and the workload getting a larger sized VM - 16+GB you should see significant performance improvement. Because it's hourly you can spin up and test and if it doesn't suit your needs will be a minimal charge. We also made a promo code : NEWSYC10 - so you can get a $10 credit to test with before incurring any charges.

btipling 13y ago

I believe "meteoric" implies a quick fall. A light that burns brightly, but disappears quickly. Not sure the data warrants the use of that adjective in this context.

garraeth 13y ago

I've been on DO for several months now and love them. And as far as reliability, I've had binarycanary pointed at my sites for about a month now with one outage that lasted about a minute and then resolved itself. To me, for the price/benefits, that's amazing. One other thing people rarely mention with hosting, that's SUPER important to me, are the FAQs/Docs, and DO really comes through in that area imo.

beigeotter 13y ago
Hi Garraeth! Thank so much for the shoutout about the docs. We are very focused on building up our developer community (with our IRC channel #digitalocean, forum, and tutorials) and growing as an educational resource. If you ever have any additional article requests, please feel free to send them to etel@digitalocean.com

rjonesx 13y ago

I love DO, favorite hosting environment ever. Still use Linode for some stuff, but only because I don't want to go through the headache of moving it.

btb 13y ago

Inspired by the article I signed up and spun up a 512 mb droplet. It eventually came up(although took alot longer than the advertised 55 secs). Felt very sluggish, or maybe they run alot of startup scripts on boot? I tried running "top" and it ran a whole bunch of unfamiliar looking commands using 96% CPU. So I destroyed the droplet and wanted to try a 8gb/4core droplet. In the interface it says it was created in 173 seconds. But now 10 mins later I still cant ssh or ping the given IP. So while the pricing is definately good, and I like the idea of SSD-only storage, my first half-hour impression of the service was that it seems a bit rough around the edges and not something I would want to bet my company's hosting on.

Afforess 13y ago
Just to make sure you didn't miss a simple step (like I have before...) after you spin up an instance, they email you the ssh login details. Did you check your email?
perryh2 13y ago
I create new droplets from time to time and I've never had much of an issue provisioning new instances.
rcsorensen 13y ago
I had the same thing. Logged in to their web console with the details they sent and restarted the host. It looks like the network didn't initialize correctly on the first go.

freework 13y ago

I switched to these guys after my reserved instance ran out at AWS. I was paying $50 a month for EC2 small, which was super slow. Since switching to DigitalOcean, not only am I paying $10 a month, but my site feels much much faster now. DO wins because IO is very fast on the SSDs. By comparison, Amazon's EBS is glacial.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
Local SSDs are always going to beat out iSCSI (which is what Amazon EBS' are under the hood).

PascalW 13y ago

My experience has also been great so far, superb performance and great pricing. It's also very nice to see them roll out new features on a pretty quick phase.

pavs 13y ago

Happy Do customer, really nothing bad to say about them (yet). Been with them for couple of months now. Reminds me of slicehost, but with much much better price.

mhd 13y ago

Has the quality of their billing system risen, too?

pfg 13y ago

I've been using DigitalOcean to host a GitLab instance for a while now (20GB Droplet) and it's been working great. I ran into two small issues so far. First of all, for some reason the traffic from my home connection is routed through New York (I'm in Europe using a Droplet in Amsterdam), resulting in a ~150ms RTT (I usually get 30-40ms to Amsterdam). Since this only happens with my home connection and it's fine in the office, my ISP might be the one to blame for this. Anyway, I've opened a ticket, so maybe they can fix it. The other weird thing is how they hande kernels/kernel versions. You can't simply update your kernel through apt (or anything like that) - you have to select the kernel version from a gigantic drop-down (containing multiple kernel versions for every distribution you can run) in their UI. Plus, adding new kernels seems to be a manual process for them, since it takes a while until updated kernels become available. I'm sure they're working on a better solution for that though. All in all, they offer great service for an even better price, so I'm happy with my choice.

PascalW 13y ago
Yes, the way kernels are managed is also something that annoys me. But it seems they're working on it: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader- http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea....
- ics 13y ago
  Actually reading the comments further might give you a more somber impression of what "working on it" is in this case. That said, I'll stay optimistic since my work doesn't depend on it and I'm happy to have another super cheap Arch instance.
hnriot 13y ago
The traffic is routed through NY to make it easier for the NSA.

rschmitty 13y ago

Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?

Afforess 13y ago
Probably, as the $5 instance is only 1 core. You might be able to squeeze more on if you aren't using much memory, or don't mind adding swap space (ssd swap is fast enough for me...)
rozap 13y ago
It depends on a lot of things. Try load testing it. I modified bees with machine guns to run on DigitalOcean instead of AWS, so you can load test to your heart's desire. it's here: https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns
pfg 13y ago
I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 503516 488644 14872 0 9036 203300 -/+ buffers/cache: 276308 227208 Swap: 1048572 153704 894868 Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd recommend adding a swapfile so you don't run out of memory at some point - since they're using SSDs, swapping is not that bad.)
- rschmitty 13y ago
  Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?
  - pfg 13y ago
    GitLab is using puma (configured to 1 worker/8 threads in my case), and I'm running nginx in front of it. Sidekiq seems to be eating the biggest chunk of my memory (~20%), so I might be able to save some memory by tuning that.

rorrr2 13y ago

Could you publish non-anonymized SSD reliability data? When Google did publish their extensive HDD reliability study they removed all brand/model names, so it's pretty useless for consumers.

wmf 13y ago
I suspect such data wouldn't be that useful even if it included model names because by the time you have good data on a model it's old enough that it's no longer price competitive. Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Netflix is already deploying the brand new Crucial m500, although their monkeys probably care more about cost than reliability.
- derefr 13y ago
  Sure, information on particular models is pretty useless, but dredging the data might turn up model series that tend to outperform other series/other brands.

KenCochrane 13y ago

I have been using Digital Ocean as a sandbox for playing with Docker, and it has been great. I can spin up a server in less then 1 minute, install the Docker dependencies, and be up in running in no time. I do what I need to do, and then I spin it down if I don't need it anymore. I wrote down my notes on how to get Docker running on Digital Ocean, if anyone wants to play with it. There is even a promo code for a $10 credit for new signups. http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digital-ocean/ http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/06/running-docker-on-digita... I had a couple of issues when I first tried using them, but I was able to get help pretty quickly on a Saturday morning no less. I haven't used them for anything production quality yet, I have most of that stuff on EC2 and Rackspace right now, but I hope to start moving some smaller projects to DO as they come up. Someone else mentioned this already as well, but the SSD is so nice compared to EC2's EBS, so if you are doing anything with lots of I/O then it is a must have.

darkarmani 13y ago
Thanks. I was up in running in no time following those directions. Oddly enough the first few tries running hello world came back with 502 errors: > root@docker:/proc# docker run base /bin/echo hello world Pulling repository base from https://index.docker.io/v1 https://index.docker.io/v1 2013/06/13 22:19:37 HTTP code: 502 After about 2 minutes it just started working. Was that a networking hiccup and on which side?
- julien421 13y ago
  This was a temporary problem due to a AWS DNS Resolution issue[1], but it seems to be back now. Do you confirm? http://status.aws.amazon.com/ http://status.aws.amazon.com/ [1] 3:42 PM PDT We are investigating DNS resolution issues in the US-EAST-1 Region.
  - shykes 13y ago
    Looks like maybe it should be hosted on Digital Ocean ;)

dear 13y ago

I am a happy user of Digital Ocean. Thumbs up! Wish you all the best!

graue 13y ago

Is anyone else bothered by the vague, overbroad restrictions in DigitalOcean's terms of service? Particularly: "2.5 You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: [..] Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental" Almost anything can be offensive to someone. I compared the Linode and AWS terms of service and neither has anything like this. While none of my own content is by any means extreme, the presence of this provision seems like a red flag and has kept me from switching to DO.

trekky1700 13y ago
Wait, people actually read the Terms of Service?
- grayrest 13y ago
  If you're going to use it for your business it might be a good idea.
- kGrange 13y ago
  Most "people" don't, but if you're on Hacker News, I'm going to assume you're a little more tech-oriented than most "people." In that case, check out ToS's on the services you use. They're, suprisingly, usually not that long or hard to read.
aroch 13y ago
That's pretty standard boilerplate language for a ToS. It essentially protects DO from someone suing them because a client is doing something offensive (like say, running a mail server to email the Goatse pic to as many people as possible)
- eurleif 13y ago
  Wouldn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... protect them regardless?

esalman 13y ago

Just received the following email from DigitalOcean: Thank You! Today is a very special day for us. As you may or may not have heard, Netcraft released a recent report that details the history of our rapid growth in comparison to other cloud hosting providers. We are extremely humbled by this recognition and cannot thank our customers enough! As we have grown over the past two years, we are continually indebted to our customers for your amazing support and feedback. Without you, DigitalOcean would not even dream of being where it is today. According to Netcraft, over the past six months we've grown 5,084.64% in web-facing computers (instances) and are responsible for 10% of the total growth worldwide. DigitalOcean's more than 50-fold growth makes it the 72nd largest hosting provider in the world by web-facing computers. Last December, we were number 549; even last month we were still 102nd. As your projects and endeavours scale, we will be there with amazing and reliable service, new features, and an unrestrained drive to create the simplest, strongest cloud that you can be proud to call home. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! You have brought us to this point. We cannot wait to keep rising together!

svintus 13y ago

We have started with using DO for our test machines / intrusion detection boxes and were so happy with price/performance/ease of use that we ended up migrating most of our infrastructure over. We now have 45 boxes hosted on DO and couldn't be happier. The network reliability has been phenomenal so far compared to some of the other providers we've dealt with - Rackspace, SoftLayer, VPS.NET, etc.

collinvandyck76 13y ago

I switched from prgmr.com to DO recently simply because of the additional RAM (double) for the same price. I really like prgmr.com, and have been a customer of theirs for years, but the new machine is simply much faster (and the network latency is also much better). Of course, this would probably be true switching to a new VPS provider after a few years of being on the same box. One thing that's unique to DO in this regard, though, is that their onboarding process is super smooth. I was up and running very quickly.

yumraj 13y ago

I'm currently using EC2 with RDS primarily because RDS provides major benefits to a non-DBA like me. Given that I would prefer to keep using RDS, and the network latency etc., any thoughts/advise on how DO-RDS would perform compared to EC2-RDS, with everything being in N.CA/SF Zone and using comparable EC2/DO instances for running my app server? Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision.

opinologo 13y ago
>>Alternately, is there an easy way to benchmark RDS i/o from EC2 and DO, both running Linux which can help in making this decision. I found the benchmarks in http://serverbear.com/ http://serverbear.com/ very reliable

geerlingguy 13y ago

Here are a few benchmarks I ran against DO, Linode, and Hot Drupal (another provider I've used in the past): http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-benchmarks-linode http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-be... I've been very happy with my testing on Digital Ocean; the servers are fast, they remain up as much as any other provider, and the interface/service is great, and is improving every month. The only sore spot is that two times I've had intermittent dropouts—once caused by someone DDoSing another DO site, and the other time for unexplained reasons. (And I know that the dropouts weren't just me, since I was monitoring things with https://servercheck.in/ https://servercheck.in/, which runs partly on Digital Ocean VPSes).

mschalle 13y ago

My one gripe with DigitalOcean is that their customer support leaves a great deal to be desired. For days I've been unable to replicate images across regions (any droplet I try to create gets in a permanent stuck state and can't be killed). I filed a service ticket days ago and was told I'd receive a response shortly but have still heard nothing. I've even sent replies pleading for some recognition that my issue is being worked on, but have received no response and no indication that they are working on my ticket. This does not bode well considering that creating a droplet from an existing image is a major feature of their product, and is not properly working. While I have liked DO when it works and their prices are great, it comes at a cost. In my case that cost is their product not properly functioning and their team seemingly having no intention of fixing my issue.

Veratyr 13y ago
As someone who works in (completely unrelated) support, the numerous emails may be a contributing factor to your problem. Most support is done using last contact as the priority. When you send a new email, you're resetting that counter and bumping yourself to the bottom of the queue. This was a problem we had with a /particular/ support system (Kayako) and we've since resolved it (with ZenDesk) but if they're using something silly like Kayako, that might be the reason. Also, if they have a phone number, use it. Not justifying what they do, just trying to help you work them out.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Hmmm, that might explain why Pebble (the smart watch) support had this super passive aggressive sounding "if you keep emailing us about the same issue, we'll put your case to the bottom of the list" instructions. Not the message you really want to be sending your already disgruntled customers - "Do I mail them and check to see if they even got my email which hasn't had any response in two weeks, or will that just put me _another_ two weeks further down their already abysmally slow response queue?".

jsingleton 13y ago

It's a shame that they don't offer Windows as an OS and don't plan to. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2536799-can-i-deploy-windows- http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... I did some testing of .NET on Windows vs mono on Linux and unfortunately mono is just too slow. For the money saved on licenses more would have to be spent on hardware. Licensing is a pain though. Working out what you need and how to pay is non-trivial.

voltagex_ 13y ago
Are you able to elaborate on the testing you did? Did you raise any bug reports over with Mono?

X-Istence 13y ago

The only issue I've had is that the network seems to drop every so often. Using them right now as an OpenVPN end point/IRC client.

mp99e99 13y ago

Congrats, this is a great win for DO.

paul9290 13y ago

Our CTO moved us (sleep.fm & SpeakerBlast) to DigitalOcean a few months ago. We were using GoDaddy so this is definitely a step up!

guelo 13y ago

I'm about to ditch DigitalOcean because I keep experiencing long lags in the ssh terminals. Sometimes when doing things that stress the terminal, like tail-ing a busy log file or running a full-screen app like top or vim, it will hang for minutes.

mitchwainer 13y ago
Sorry to hear! Are you still experiencing issues? Feel free to email me directly at mitch@digitalocean.com.

frou_dh 13y ago

They are certainly generous with promos. Just today I got an unsolicited $5 credit and I haven't even burned through the original credit I got for signing up via Twitter.

akurilin 13y ago

Is there a SKU for more disk-heavy workloads like a box running Postgres? I'd love to be able to get more disk space (especially since you guys have SSDs, this will make PG very happy) without the extra CPU and memory. Is that currently possible with Digital Ocean?

dorfsmay 13y ago
No. I have spent hours searching for a cloud provider with decent disk space at a "decent" price, and it basically does not exist. The only thing I have been able to find are physical hosts, with all the issues associated with them (40$ for 2 x 1 TB disk at http://ovh.com http://ovh.com).
- akurilin 13y ago
  Argh, that's too bad, thanks for letting me know. Perhaps something along the lines of Heroku's Postgres hosting would be good?
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    Heroku is good because they take sysadmin/DBA headaches away from you, but I wouldn't call them cheap. My take on this is that if you want or need to run your own database with a large amount of storage, there are three solutions: - run it in house, which means you now need a redundant link to the internet, server class machines (redundant power supply), etc, etc, etc... Unlikely unless you already have your own data centre - use a VM to which you can add storage (EC2, google, etc...). That is expensive (0.1$/GiB) but typically very reliable (they use redundant physical storage), and flexible (you can move your storage around, rebuild VMs etc...). - use a colo site, or a rent a cheap physical. You get a lot of space for a very reasonable price, but have all the headaches of a physical (storage is only as redundant as you make it, no hardware mirroring/raid'ing, if the storage fails, you've lost your OS as well, and now have to restore from backup, changing OS means renting a second physical, install, transfer data, etc...).
    - 13y ago

opinologo 13y ago

I made a thorough analysis recently and discovered that catalysthost.com would give me the best value for money. I am using a "Trenta" OpenVZ Ubuntu 12.04 machine for $15.99 per month and I am quite happy with the performance, including network performance. This is the spec of the vm: 4 CPU Cores 2GB RAM 512MB vSwap 60GB Storage 2TB Bandwidth @ 1Gbps You can compare similar plans here: http://serverbear.com/1826-trenta-catalysthost#benchmarks http://serverbear.com/1826-trenta-catalysthost#benchmarks http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean http://serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean

eliben 13y ago

I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.

jacques_chester 13y ago
It's an artifact of small figures and small sample sizes generally. Anything which grows geometrically will grow progressively more slowly over time when expressed as a percentage.
adventured 13y ago
Incorrect. If you were right, then every provider that was small would be skyrocketing up the usage charts. However, that's numerically impossible. Many smaller providers simply die off or never gain any traction. This time next year, they'll likely be in the top 15 to top 25 on that same list.
- eliben 13y ago
  Precisely. When a smaller provider goes from 1000 to 50 users, it's a "ZOMG 95% drop!" while only 950 users left, line noise for bigger providers. You're adding another example to my point. Naturally I didn't say that all small numbers always change drastically. But those that do change, appear to be more drastic than larger numbers.