13 ms·

DigitalOcean Sucks. Use DigitalOcean

208 points by mdewinter 13y ago

mateuszf 13y ago
Digital Ocean is great. The only thing keeping us from using it is lack of private networking in Amsterdam DC.
- clone1018 13y ago
  Their private networking is not private to you, it's private to all customers. Meaning I could access your server via your internal IP. What advantage are you looking for?
  - zhemao 13y ago
    I'm guessing it has something to do with EU data privacy laws.
    - staked 13y ago
      It's because DO only offers internal/private networking in their NYC2 datacenter and thus not available in the AMS center.
  - mateuszf 13y ago
    I'm looking for free, speedy network for my data to not go through Internet. Data should be encrypted anyway.
    - mikeyen 13y ago
      Can you just establish a ssh / ssl vpn tunnel for that?
      - mateuszf 13y ago
        I'm afraid that ElasticSearch cluster may be to slow to work on this setup.
tlongren 13y ago
Recently moved a few sites to a single, 1GB droplet and am very, very happy with it. Also have been using a 512MB droplet for the last 3 months or so to run a tor relay. Their "one-click" installs are nice too, and WordPress runs really well on a 1GB droplet.
threeio 13y ago
Been a big fan since their first deploy... grandfathering is nice for unlimited bandwidth... Use them for most test setups now, proof of concepts, etc... heck I've even got a domain pointed at them, and I've run my own DNS servers since the early 90s ;)
neom 13y ago
IPv6 is something we get asked about a lot, and it's on the way. Unfortunately it's not something we can just "turn on" - We have to make sure it's build out properly and also fits in with some of our other roadmap items that our community will love in the coming year. So yeah, love the feedback and actively working every day to bring any suck to zero.
- stanley 13y ago
  I came across an article [1] that mentions load balancing as an upcoming feature. Is there a chance you could elaborate on the feature spec or provide a rough ETA? [1] http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digitalocean-rolling-in-with-new-features-big-plans-for-asia.html http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digital...
  - neom 13y ago
    Hey Stanley, see above. :)
- IgorPartola 13y ago
  IPv6 is a must for my use case. Currently, I have to use an IPv6 tunnel which is OK, but definitely less than ideal. Can you disclose what kind of allocation each instance or each customer will get? Hopefully, you guys will be much less stingy with them than Linode, and give each customer a /48 to allocate freely between the individual nodes. I am a very happy customer currently and am looking to use DO for my next project which involves heavy use of your API and lots of concurrent instances. As a customer I can testify that your product is a fantastic value for the price. Keep up the good work!
  - neom 13y ago
    Totally get the ipv6 tunnel being a pain. I think our allowances will have to be sorted out a little down the road but /48 is easy to acquire (unlike ipv4 where we have to wait till we're at 80% capacity before we're allocated more IPs). ipv6 gets a little sticky when you start talking about the internet of things, there are a lot of new concepts introduced that we have to take into account when we're managing what is closing in on a million of the worlds public hosts. I don't see ANY reason why we won't allow a least one /48 per droplet. Part of our slowness on things like CDN, load balancing, failover etc are because we want the system to be really well build out to accommodate both ipv6 and the future of internet protocol addressing. While I can't speak for other providers, for us it's something we take seriously, but need to test all our systems together to make sure cloud 2.0 if you will works really we.. As I'm sure you know, we've scaled massively in the last 8 months and unfortunately the "lets just pop in a feature" becomes a lot more complex as the complexity and stability needs of our customers increase. What I can say with 100% confidence is that there is a group of really amazing engineers working on this stuff and it's all in a roadmap, we just have to make sure everything is simple, stable and safe before we roll out. I hope you can appreciate your measure in this matter. :)
matiasb 13y ago
A few weeks ago it was still possible to sniff traffic from other instances. http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53
- neom 13y ago
  We addressed this as soon as it was brought to our attention and is no longer a vulnerability. :)
sdesol 13y ago
It would be nice if implementing something like Amazon Marketplace was in their roadmap but it isn't right now.
- neom 13y ago
  I wouldn't say it's not on our radar. ;)
luos 13y ago
I use smallest Digital Ocean package (Amsterdam) to run a play 2.x scala app. It is not a visited site (yet, heh) but I am very happy with it. And they gave me a coupon when I couldnt tinker with the project and cancelled, so I am back again :) The sucks part fortunately havent affected me yet. I could use a little more ram but when I am there it could be changed with a click (and a reboot if I remember correctly).
batbomb 13y ago
I was trying recently trying to estimate write-ahead log performance for my 2GB droplet, and for random sized (2-8k, 4.3k avg) sequential writes, my droplet is able to throw out 230MB/sec or ~60k 4k writes/second. I haven't actually done database benchmarks yet, but it looks pretty promising.
Kalki 13y ago
I'd really like to see additional storage available for a node. I'd like to add an additional 100gb to my 20$ per month node.
- aquadrop 13y ago
  I second that. I understand SSD space is expensive, but sometimes you have 0.05 load average and full disk. At least it would be nice to get some kind of Amazon EBS analogue.
- marveller 13y ago
  Agree, I am also running out of disk space now, don't need additional RAM or CPU power.
  - mikeyen 13y ago
    Has anyone consider collocation yet? For DO 's 160GB 16G $160 packages, I figure I can easily put a 1u in colo center with a few TBs for $99 / month in Bay area. Any pro/con with that approach?
- fareesh 13y ago
  I read somewhere on their forums that this is planned. I too, am eagerly anticipating this.
- mikeyen 13y ago
  Me too!
karmicthreat 13y ago
I like DigitalOcean and these problems are annoying. I'd really like to run coreos. DO claimed they were near deploying a custom image feature months ago. But it has never materialized. The lack of IPv6 is a pain but I can deal with it. And the screw up with the NY2 network going down for a day kind of soured things as well. What I'd really like is for DO to be a bit faster with feature development and more transparent on their progress.
- neom 13y ago
  We're working on a few new ways to deploy custom stuff, we want it to be really fly and work really really well and be really really simple so we are refining it. I can't give a timeline for this but it's in our short term roadmap for sure.
  - karmicthreat 13y ago
    It doesn't need to be perfect. I can deal with a more complex but functional feature tomorrow far better than a perfect feature in a year.
    - neom 13y ago
      Totally, however a lot of our install base tend not to be as technical. The disparity between devs is getting massive.
      - rgj 13y ago
        Why not provide early access to new features to technical people who don't mind to be on the bleeding edge? That would be a sword cutting on two edges since you'll get high quality feedback in an early stage.
        elithrar 13y ago
        > Why not provide early access to new features to technical people who don't mind to be on the bleeding edge? That would be a sword cutting on two edges since you'll get high quality feedback in an early stage. I'd hazard a guess and say that people who often think they are on the bleeding edge aren't, and therefore get themselves into trouble.
fakeanon 13y ago
"TL;DR: DigitalOcean is a good VPS provider with minor issues. I like them and have been using them for over a year." -- Thus a dishonest title.
- UntitledNo4 13y ago
  I think the title of the original post is trying to be creative. The world would be a boring place if everything was stated as a matter of fact. You might not like the author's creativity, but I wouldn't call it dishonest.
- larrys 13y ago
  It's a link bait title. Got me to read it. The word "minor" doesn't get me interested. Other suggestions: "Why John Kennedy would have loved Digital Ocean" "What Digital Ocean and the weather have in common". Sorry I hate to joke and I don't want HN to end up just being people joking. But I had to point out that the title that gets attention is the title that gets your attention.
nwh 13y ago
I've still had absolutely no issues with my running droplets, though space is getting very tight in AMS1 at times when creating new ones. Their support is excellent even if you have a very specific question about their network, there's none of the fluffing around I've seen with other providers. It's cost effective even for my non-existent budget. Put simply, I'm pleased as punch. I'm not usually vocally supportive of companies, but they're doing quite a good job: this article is a little undeserved.
- neom 13y ago
  We're going to be making an announcement about AMS late this week / early next.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Excited, thanks!
- larrys 13y ago
  "with my running droplets" Personally, I hate new names like this for old things.. [1] Stop making up names for things. My brain doesn't want to learn a new language for something that can easily be called by the legacy name. It's wasted time and slows things down. (I'm exaggerating a bit of course but why do I have to learn something new of no value to me? And I'm reading this and someone is commenting calling things droplets and now I have to do a search to find out what a droplet is...) Reminds me of some of Spike Lee's first films where he was more concerned with coming up with some creative oddity that could be linked to him. (If you've ever taken a film class you probably remember the prof talking about something that Hitchcock was doing in the film that had never been done before.) [1] From DO website: "DigitalOcean calls its virtual servers, droplets; each droplet that you spin up is a new virtual server for your personal use. "
  - chc 13y ago
    I agree with this in many cases, but "Droplets" is really not difficult. Some providers invent whole new languages for perfectly mundane things. Digital Ocean just brands their virtual servers in a very straightforward way.
networked 13y ago
Could someone who has used both DigitalOcean and RamNode say how they compare?
- tigerweeds 13y ago
  No experience with DO, but RamNode is very good. I've been a customer for over a year, and I rarely had any downtime. Disk speed is between 300MB and over 1GB (on SSD), network speed can go over 70MB/s.
- disdev 13y ago
  I have both RamNode and Digital Ocean servers in production. In terms of performance and cost, both are great. I haven't ever had any issues with Digital Ocean. With RamNode, they've had a couple of issues where there's been minimal downtime. And they had a breach back in June, but responded well. I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier and performance maybe slightly better.
- staked 13y ago
  I used RamNode for a bit last year, but left them for DO after dealing with RamNode's servers getting DDoS'd constantly. While I'm sure it happens with DO as well, at least there I don't feel like they're active participants in the various VPS provider feuds that you see all the time over at LowEndBox.
SudoAlex 13y ago
Treat DigitalOcean as any other provider - something you can't trust, so always have backups of your own data in a place you trust (not a DigitalOcean snapshot) so you can restore when needed. Personally I use Ansible http://www.ansibleworks.com/ http://www.ansibleworks.com/ and rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/ http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/, along with Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ for testing. So the day something happens with my droplet on DigitalOcean - I'll just run Ansible on a fresh server and restore the remaining data with rdiff-backup. Yes, the lack of IPv6, being unable to use a virtual machines bootloader, a lack of a decent rescue image, and no private networking apart from one location sucks. However for the price - it's a good deal.
- sksk 13y ago
  Would it be possible for you to describe your rdiff process a bit more? Do you dump the database periodically and backup that data or do you run rdiff on the binary data directory of your DB? Also, where is the rdiff backup data stored? I am guessing you would need another server for this and cannot be just Amazon S3? Thanks!
  - SudoAlex 13y ago
    On a local server at home, it's a low powered ARM box (QNAP TS-219 running Debian) with RAID1. The same thing could probably be done with a Raspberry Pi for lower costs if I was doing it now. For database backups, you need a consistent snapshot of the data - something which might not happen if you attempt to access the data directly. Add a script to your daily crontab directory, such as: mysqldump --skip-extended-insert --all-databases --single-transaction --master-data=2 --flush-logs | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz Or: sudo -u postgres pg_dumpall | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz Into a directory which rdiff-backup will download. I always prefer to pull my backups from a local server I can trust instead of running a process on the server to push backups - if someone gains access to the server they could potentially destroy the backups if all the credentials are left on the server.
    - sksk 13y ago
simfoo 13y ago
Been using them for a few weeks now for a private Minecraft server (<= 6 people, whitelisted). Additionally it serves a statically generated map over nginx and I've been trying to get OpenVPN to work. It's a $10 one, 1 gig of RAM in Amsterdam. Generally I'm quite happy so far. The setup process and the management panel is awesome while the CPU performance is lacking a bit. I/O performance (both disk and network) is great.
cmaxwe 13y ago
The font on that site is what really sucks... :-)
- JesseObrien 13y ago
  I had to go in an remove the custom font CSS in chrome to get through that article. That font is absolutely terrible!
- abjorn 13y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed the terrible typography.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  There must be a reason the Chromium/Chrome team decides to displays custom fonts like that on Windows. They almost universally look terrible, or at least worse than every other browser and every other platform. No other browser renders them so thin that the lines of the glyphs become disconnected. I opened a bug report about font rendering and text color issues in 2011. Not only is narrow text rendered oddly as you can see, but if you give it any color other than black, the rendered color doesn't match the color you specify in CSS. It can be way off, like blues rendering as purple. Last I checked, the bug was still open with no work done on it.
  - jahewson 13y ago
    Chrome still uses the old Win32 API (GDI) to display fonts, whereas IE and FF are now using DirectWrite.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    It's been a problem since Chrome's early days, on all platforms: http://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/ http://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/
- rallison 13y ago
  Yup. It renders improperly on Chrome and Firefox, but properly on IE (at least, on IE10).
jpdlla 13y ago
I'm currently using Ubiquity SSD Cloud Servers and I'm happy with them, but still find it weird that its not that popular. Anyone else using them? Any difference between them and DO?
- akg_67 13y ago
  It is not popular because the site lists all plans sold out, i.e. no new interest in the site.
  - jpdlla 13y ago
    I just noticed that and sent them a message about it. Thats definitely weird and not inviting at all. You can actually get more cloud servers once you signup.
veeti 13y ago
Are there any (decent) similar per-hour priced providers based in the EU? Any experiences or suggestions?
- csmuk 13y ago
  There are no decent ones. I've tried them all now. Moved to DO and have had no problems so far. TBH ALL the VPS providers are better than colo/cage suppliers from my experience who even at the high end are shit.
- eCa 13y ago
  I plan on setting up a vps at Gandi [0] shortly. Based on what I've heard they seem decent (not only as a domain registrar). [0] https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy
  - kmike84 13y ago
    I had awful experience with Gandi several years ago: ssh was broken on a newly created server (wrong permissions for some ssh folder), and CPU was limited in a fun way: processes periodically stopped to do CPU work for 200-300ms (once each second or so). We moved to Linode (they have servers in London), and for the same price got literally 20x faster performance (measured as rps), good support and flawless setup. Of course, things might have changed since that time.
j45 13y ago
I won't use DO for everything, but I won't use Linode for everything either, and that's ok. I also use dedicated servers with VMs and they all have their place and purpose quite nicely. With tools like docker, it's less about where you're hosting and more about being able to deploy to any infrastructure, as the only guarantee you'll have for the rest of your life is you'll be redeploying somewhere, be it with the same host or another one. I think for what you pay, what you get, and the level of flexibility, DO is a great value and service in that it's not a random, small, no name vps provider that may disappear due to not managing their resources between the fine line of over or under subscribing. Where I wouldn't get a Linode and recommend someone to get shared hosting, I can start them on DO and let them grow there, so I quite like the segment they've let me introduce dedicated VPS resources to.
- leddt 13y ago
  Does Docker run on Digital Ocean? I tried to set it up a few months ago, without success. Maybe things have changed since. Something to do with DO using LXC with a setup that wouldn't work with Docker.
  - AhtiK 13y ago
    Docker in Ubuntu 13.x has been working great for me at DO. Just have to use a recent enough kernel. DO itself is a full VM virtualization and afaik is not using kernel-level isolation/LXC.
    - neom 13y ago
      Correct, we run KVM vs some type of PID isolation or LXC. :)
    - leddt 13y ago
      Ah you are right, I must have been confused with something else. Thanks for the info!
  - neom 13y ago
    It sure does! https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-docker-on-ubuntu-13-04-x64-vps https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...
nodejscloud 13y ago
We https://commando.io https://commando.io use, love, and are sponsored by DigitalOcean. They've been awesome and amazing. The SliceHost of 2012/2013. Some features we really want to see are when upgrading a droplet, the ability for the disk to increase in size. Right now, you have to image it, delete it, create a new droplet from the image, and pray that you keep the same IP address. Not a suitable solution for companies relying on uptime and stability. Second, when creating a droplet, the ability to check a box, "ensure this droplet is provisioned on a different hypervisor then the rest of your droplets." Again, when building a highly available cluster, does absolutely no good if they are all on the same physical machine. Finally, the ability to attach multiple ip addresses to a single droplet is a must have. With that said, thanks DO, you guys rock!
- Goopplesoft 13y ago
  Commando.io rocks man! I actually use commando server management on digital ocean :) The IP thing is definitely annoying especially since you're never guaranteed an IP (say you want to switch VMs) even in the same region. That and hard drive size which has definitely made me pay more than I should (when I don't need that much CPU/RAM but need the disk space). Otherwise great experience with them.
mrbill 13y ago
For just needing an off-site VM for backup-relay-host/testing/debugging purposes, you just can't beat $5/month. Been very happy with them, and the fact that I can just throw $50 into my account and not have to worry about it for almost a year.
csmuk 13y ago
I run my web, email and some other stuff off a cheap end DO droplet for $5/month. Can't say I've had any problems other than availability of droplets in Amsterdam. I'm in the UK but have a VM in NY2. To be fair the latency feels about the same as our production kit which is 7 miles from my house, not 3460 miles. DO is less hops as well.
- junto 13y ago
  What are you using for email? Did you find a good install guide?
  - breakall 13y ago
    I don't know about the GP, but I used the "How To Install iRedMail On Ubuntu 12.04 x64"[1] guide on Digital Ocean's community site and was pretty successful in setting up my mail server, complete with postfix, dovecot, spamassasin, greylisting, ssl/tls, webmail, etc. 1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-iredmail-on-ubuntu-12-04-x64 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...
  - csmuk 13y ago
    I wrote it up the other day conveniently. Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750630 Basically, mutt, postfix, procmail.
ianbicking 13y ago
I do wish there was something akin to S3 to allow for larger amounts of storage, without necessarily being bundled in complete package that gets upgraded together (and there would be no SSD required). Obviously using S3 is still an option, but it would be nice to have the network locality and maybe even the general value proposition that DigitalOcean provides.
- snoonan 13y ago
  Yeah, it makes it hard for those of us with a lot of audio and video to deal with. We still need to be on Amazon for those assets, though would very much prefer to have them available through a locally mounted filesystem on our Digital Ocean instances.
bnycum 13y ago
Not seeing anyone here talk about it so maybe no one has had it happen to them, but how is everyone dealing with the disk failures? Seems like your one to two man startup could have a fun day ahead of them. Not to mention if it happened on your launch day. Coming from someone looking to use DO for a future project.
- justinhj 13y ago
  They do provide a backup service but personally I can rebuild everything from a github repo if it does go down.
- Lazare 13y ago
  Use something like Ansible (Puppet, Salt, Chef, whatever) to provision your servers, along with backups. You can also use DO disk images but they're not as good a solution; my Ansible playbooks will let me configure and deploy a fully functioning app or db server instance at the drop of a hat, on almost any infrastructure; a DO image is only good for deploying onto DO infrastructure. If you're "in the cloud" (or hell, even if you're using your own bare iron servers), you need to be accepting that your server could just go away at any time (and Murphy's Law being what it is, probably at the worst possible time). The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :)
  - elithrar 13y ago
    > The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :) Exactly this. My little side project is fairly minimal, but users are paying for services. If the site goes down before my next backup, I'm going to have to reverse some charges (and look bad in the process!). One option might/would be to run failover on a $5 droplet, but then I also need to cluster Redis (server-side sessions), etc, etc... and it starts to become an "operations" side project and not a "product" side project. I'm using Puppet to automate the build process (and will build a "hot spare" image to get things up faster), but backups and failover are still tricky problems to solve.
Thaxll 13y ago
You still can't boot your own kernel...
- Nux 13y ago
  "yum install kernel" then modify grub.conf?
  - tshtf 13y ago
    Nope. DigitalOcean's has been ignoring customer requests about this for 18 months on this: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader-?page=1&per_page=20 https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce... It's really hard to take them seriously when you have to wait patiently for kernel updates that include critical security fixes.
    - Nux 13y ago
      OMG!
- perryh2 13y ago
  What are some use cases that you have for running your own kernel? I just can't think of much need of running a custom kernel. There's a lot of different kernel versions to choose from. For subsystems like process scheduling, you can just load your own kernel module to change that.
  - yrro 13y ago
    Their kernels are all months out of date. And besides, I want to install updates as they are released by my distribution, rather than have to wait around for my host to get their arse in gear.
viraptor 13y ago
What I'm really looking forward to is better IP management. So far it looks like most cloud servers providers try to ignore the issue, which I'm really disappointed about. It looks like DO's answer to droplet failures is - set up a load balancer. OK, but what happens is that droplet disappears? What protection can I have against going completely offline for the duration of DNS TTL in that case? (And the time of manually changing it) I see that as an unacceptable risk really - one thing that keeps me from using DO. Other services also lack the reserved IPS sometimes, but some of them at least provide an integrated solution (LBaaS style).
CSDude 13y ago
I use DigitalOcean, my application is not very large but response time is important. 20 GB is more than enough for me, even 10 GB would be enough. Being it SSD, it runs the short lived disk-based tasks I give (compilation & copying moving files) very fast due to its SSD, compared to AWS and others. This is my usecase and I am happy with it.
johnpowell 13y ago
Yesterday I went to pay my bill and it said "Automated Abuse Detection - Account Verification". Luckily I was able to ftp in and do a back-up. After some back and forth my account was reinstated. It wasn't a huge deal but a shitty way to start my day. And after asking multiple times I was never told the reason why I had to go through this. I had been happy until now. This just left a bad taste in my mouth. edit: What pissed me off was having to send in a copy of my government issued ID.
- jzwinck 13y ago
  How would you like them to handle it? Fraud and abuse is a big problem, and government ID is a standard way to sort out who is who.
  - johnpowell 13y ago
    Telling me why I was suspected of fraud and abuse would be a good start. Another edit: I got a helpful reply. There has been a response to your ticket: Greetings, Unfortunately, we are unable to provide further information with regard to our backend abuse filters. If we may be of any further assistance, please do let us know. Regards, * Mitchell | Support Team
    - devicenull 13y ago
      You really can't think of any possible reason why they wouldn't want to tell you what triggered their fraud checks? Because it's pretty obvious to me that people would create throwaway accounts to probe for all the fraud checks, then start creating abusive accounts.
      - johnpowell 13y ago
        Well. I have paid for around a year. I would like to know what happened so I can avoid the same in the future. Like I said there was no communication and I worry that my sites will be shut down for no reason.
  - 13y ago
ilaksh 13y ago
The title is very stupid especially since he is actually giving them a recommendation. Anyway it comes down to the fact that its cheaper than any other large provider out there and almost always works very well. No one can beat that price with an actual usable service. If I was going to complain about anything it would be the current lack of 2GB/4GB etc. droplets in San Francisco and the fact that launching a droplet from a smaller snapshot takes several minutes instead of one minute.
renang 13y ago
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.84315 s, 279 MB/s I was expecting it too be faster, actually. I get over 300 MB/s on a VPS with HDD at the company I work at. [1] [1] https://true.nl https://true.nl
- joosters 13y ago
  The dd command is copying from /dev/zero I wouldn't entirely trust any disk benchmark writing empty files, you might be running into some FS optimisations there. And 300MB/s on a single spinning disk? No chance!
icelancer 13y ago
I am pleased with DO but they overpromise way too often, or at least they used to. We were supposed to be able to install instances from ISO in 2012 as promised by their support tickets: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3276477-allow-custom-images http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... It was last updated ONE YEAR AGO. Come on, that is outrageous.
shan199105 13y ago
I want to say that I hate Digital Ocean as well. I am a University of Waterloo Computer Science student. I have CS 458 (computer security) this term. We had an assignment last month asking us to get all the users permission without knowing their password for a web app. Then I wrote a script. The use of the script is to use curl one time per second (may be longer, due to the connection issue) to guess all the different combination of the password. Of course I was using that script on Digital Ocean! After running it two days, I receive an email saying their router find out that I was doing the DDOS and ask me to stop it. I stop the script immediately and reply them my reason telling them that I was doing it for University Assignment and I don't know that I was not allowed to do this. However, my account got suspends anyway. No matter how I send emails to beg them to give back my files in the server (I use the server for emacs and tmux to write codes for school projects), they just told me that sorry but my account is suspend. No matter how I beg them, all I received back from the email is just a max two line saying that my account is suspend. They do tell me that it suspends forever. After several days they deleted my account with all my files in it. Now I have no ways to get any of my files back! I feel ... so angry and hate so much about the digital ocean. Is this how a normal American Company does? Will a normal American Company suspends customers account because that customer use it to do university work? I can understand it suspends me if I violate any laws but I was just doing an assignment and not violates anything. It also ignore the apology from the customer. Any evidence the customer provides is ignored gets well. Even that after couple days, digital ocean deleted that customer's account with all his files permanently! This is my story. This is the reason why I hate Digital Ocean!!!!!!
- oahziur 13y ago
  well, this should be another case that digital ocean sucks. bad customer services plus not return important files after suspend.
  - mikeyen 13y ago
    I like to see DO put a process in place to resolve this kind of issue by require the user to have recorded Skype/google hangout session to verify I'd, credit card, etc. once the id is verified, face recorded , user is understand and agree fix the ddos type errors, the account should be restored.
mediaserf 13y ago
I use ksplice to run my own OS & kernel on Digital Ocean, you don't have to stick with their templates.
- pritambaral 13y ago
  Do you ksplice-patch your kernels on every boot?
cauliturtle 13y ago
with the first 3 points of the cons, no doubt to use DO rather than other cloud service for small/personal stuffs
eschulte 13y ago
I don't use digital ocean because https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updates-for-arch-linux https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updat...
amree 13y ago
I'm still waiting for a data center in Asia
- zzzaim 13y ago
  Me too. Curious, have you tried using the US data centers from Asia? If so, how is the speed like?
  - amree 13y ago
    Ping result shows that I'm getting around 200ms (from Malaysia)
  - thepoet 13y ago
    It's about 250ms from India
jbverschoor 13y ago
Unresponsive droplets here
kenkam 13y ago
You know Disqus has taken over English when OP asks us to disquss on Hacker News.
BrokenPipe 13y ago
I really dislike DigitalOcean. Terrible customer services. And do not give them a way to bill you automatically, use something like paypal when YOU are in control and can just not buy the credit and run out.
damell 13y ago
Thanks for the opinion. I have been considering moving my server to DigitalOcean for a while and this assured me I probably won't regret it
fruks 13y ago
Feels like a perfect place to host your hobby projects but nothing for serious business
evanprodromou 13y ago
I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean; great value and good quality. If I had any complaint, it's that occasionally I get a droplet with a wonky IP address that seems to be shared with another host (like, the SSH host key wobbles between one and the other between invocations of ssh). There was also some flakiness with NYC2 a couple of weeks ago, which caused some sadness and grief. All in all, they're saving me multiple thousands of dollars.
pearjuice 13y ago
What's with all the outdated OS images on DigitalOcean?

208 points by mdewinter 13y ago

mateuszf 13y ago

Digital Ocean is great. The only thing keeping us from using it is lack of private networking in Amsterdam DC.

clone1018 13y ago
Their private networking is not private to you, it's private to all customers. Meaning I could access your server via your internal IP. What advantage are you looking for?
- zhemao 13y ago
  I'm guessing it has something to do with EU data privacy laws.
  - staked 13y ago
    It's because DO only offers internal/private networking in their NYC2 datacenter and thus not available in the AMS center.
- mateuszf 13y ago
  I'm looking for free, speedy network for my data to not go through Internet. Data should be encrypted anyway.
  - mikeyen 13y ago
    Can you just establish a ssh / ssl vpn tunnel for that?
    - mateuszf 13y ago
      I'm afraid that ElasticSearch cluster may be to slow to work on this setup.

tlongren 13y ago

Recently moved a few sites to a single, 1GB droplet and am very, very happy with it. Also have been using a 512MB droplet for the last 3 months or so to run a tor relay. Their "one-click" installs are nice too, and WordPress runs really well on a 1GB droplet.

threeio 13y ago

Been a big fan since their first deploy... grandfathering is nice for unlimited bandwidth... Use them for most test setups now, proof of concepts, etc... heck I've even got a domain pointed at them, and I've run my own DNS servers since the early 90s ;)

neom 13y ago

IPv6 is something we get asked about a lot, and it's on the way. Unfortunately it's not something we can just "turn on" - We have to make sure it's build out properly and also fits in with some of our other roadmap items that our community will love in the coming year. So yeah, love the feedback and actively working every day to bring any suck to zero.

stanley 13y ago
I came across an article [1] that mentions load balancing as an upcoming feature. Is there a chance you could elaborate on the feature spec or provide a rough ETA? [1] http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digitalocean-rolling-in-with-new-features-big-plans-for-asia.html http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digital...
- neom 13y ago
  Hey Stanley, see above. :)
IgorPartola 13y ago
IPv6 is a must for my use case. Currently, I have to use an IPv6 tunnel which is OK, but definitely less than ideal. Can you disclose what kind of allocation each instance or each customer will get? Hopefully, you guys will be much less stingy with them than Linode, and give each customer a /48 to allocate freely between the individual nodes. I am a very happy customer currently and am looking to use DO for my next project which involves heavy use of your API and lots of concurrent instances. As a customer I can testify that your product is a fantastic value for the price. Keep up the good work!
- neom 13y ago
  Totally get the ipv6 tunnel being a pain. I think our allowances will have to be sorted out a little down the road but /48 is easy to acquire (unlike ipv4 where we have to wait till we're at 80% capacity before we're allocated more IPs). ipv6 gets a little sticky when you start talking about the internet of things, there are a lot of new concepts introduced that we have to take into account when we're managing what is closing in on a million of the worlds public hosts. I don't see ANY reason why we won't allow a least one /48 per droplet. Part of our slowness on things like CDN, load balancing, failover etc are because we want the system to be really well build out to accommodate both ipv6 and the future of internet protocol addressing. While I can't speak for other providers, for us it's something we take seriously, but need to test all our systems together to make sure cloud 2.0 if you will works really we.. As I'm sure you know, we've scaled massively in the last 8 months and unfortunately the "lets just pop in a feature" becomes a lot more complex as the complexity and stability needs of our customers increase. What I can say with 100% confidence is that there is a group of really amazing engineers working on this stuff and it's all in a roadmap, we just have to make sure everything is simple, stable and safe before we roll out. I hope you can appreciate your measure in this matter. :)

matiasb 13y ago

A few weeks ago it was still possible to sniff traffic from other instances. http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53

neom 13y ago
We addressed this as soon as it was brought to our attention and is no longer a vulnerability. :)

sdesol 13y ago

It would be nice if implementing something like Amazon Marketplace was in their roadmap but it isn't right now.

neom 13y ago
I wouldn't say it's not on our radar. ;)

luos 13y ago

I use smallest Digital Ocean package (Amsterdam) to run a play 2.x scala app. It is not a visited site (yet, heh) but I am very happy with it. And they gave me a coupon when I couldnt tinker with the project and cancelled, so I am back again :) The sucks part fortunately havent affected me yet. I could use a little more ram but when I am there it could be changed with a click (and a reboot if I remember correctly).

batbomb 13y ago

I was trying recently trying to estimate write-ahead log performance for my 2GB droplet, and for random sized (2-8k, 4.3k avg) sequential writes, my droplet is able to throw out 230MB/sec or ~60k 4k writes/second. I haven't actually done database benchmarks yet, but it looks pretty promising.

Kalki 13y ago

I'd really like to see additional storage available for a node. I'd like to add an additional 100gb to my 20$ per month node.

aquadrop 13y ago
I second that. I understand SSD space is expensive, but sometimes you have 0.05 load average and full disk. At least it would be nice to get some kind of Amazon EBS analogue.
marveller 13y ago
Agree, I am also running out of disk space now, don't need additional RAM or CPU power.
- mikeyen 13y ago
  Has anyone consider collocation yet? For DO 's 160GB 16G $160 packages, I figure I can easily put a 1u in colo center with a few TBs for $99 / month in Bay area. Any pro/con with that approach?
fareesh 13y ago
I read somewhere on their forums that this is planned. I too, am eagerly anticipating this.
mikeyen 13y ago
Me too!

karmicthreat 13y ago

I like DigitalOcean and these problems are annoying. I'd really like to run coreos. DO claimed they were near deploying a custom image feature months ago. But it has never materialized. The lack of IPv6 is a pain but I can deal with it. And the screw up with the NY2 network going down for a day kind of soured things as well. What I'd really like is for DO to be a bit faster with feature development and more transparent on their progress.

neom 13y ago
We're working on a few new ways to deploy custom stuff, we want it to be really fly and work really really well and be really really simple so we are refining it. I can't give a timeline for this but it's in our short term roadmap for sure.
- karmicthreat 13y ago
  It doesn't need to be perfect. I can deal with a more complex but functional feature tomorrow far better than a perfect feature in a year.
  - neom 13y ago
    Totally, however a lot of our install base tend not to be as technical. The disparity between devs is getting massive.
    - rgj 13y ago
      Why not provide early access to new features to technical people who don't mind to be on the bleeding edge? That would be a sword cutting on two edges since you'll get high quality feedback in an early stage.
      - elithrar 13y ago
        > Why not provide early access to new features to technical people who don't mind to be on the bleeding edge? That would be a sword cutting on two edges since you'll get high quality feedback in an early stage. I'd hazard a guess and say that people who often think they are on the bleeding edge aren't, and therefore get themselves into trouble.

fakeanon 13y ago

"TL;DR: DigitalOcean is a good VPS provider with minor issues. I like them and have been using them for over a year." -- Thus a dishonest title.

UntitledNo4 13y ago
I think the title of the original post is trying to be creative. The world would be a boring place if everything was stated as a matter of fact. You might not like the author's creativity, but I wouldn't call it dishonest.
larrys 13y ago
It's a link bait title. Got me to read it. The word "minor" doesn't get me interested. Other suggestions: "Why John Kennedy would have loved Digital Ocean" "What Digital Ocean and the weather have in common". Sorry I hate to joke and I don't want HN to end up just being people joking. But I had to point out that the title that gets attention is the title that gets your attention.

nwh 13y ago

I've still had absolutely no issues with my running droplets, though space is getting very tight in AMS1 at times when creating new ones. Their support is excellent even if you have a very specific question about their network, there's none of the fluffing around I've seen with other providers. It's cost effective even for my non-existent budget. Put simply, I'm pleased as punch. I'm not usually vocally supportive of companies, but they're doing quite a good job: this article is a little undeserved.

neom 13y ago
We're going to be making an announcement about AMS late this week / early next.
- nwh 13y ago
  Excited, thanks!
larrys 13y ago
"with my running droplets" Personally, I hate new names like this for old things.. [1] Stop making up names for things. My brain doesn't want to learn a new language for something that can easily be called by the legacy name. It's wasted time and slows things down. (I'm exaggerating a bit of course but why do I have to learn something new of no value to me? And I'm reading this and someone is commenting calling things droplets and now I have to do a search to find out what a droplet is...) Reminds me of some of Spike Lee's first films where he was more concerned with coming up with some creative oddity that could be linked to him. (If you've ever taken a film class you probably remember the prof talking about something that Hitchcock was doing in the film that had never been done before.) [1] From DO website: "DigitalOcean calls its virtual servers, droplets; each droplet that you spin up is a new virtual server for your personal use. "
- chc 13y ago
  I agree with this in many cases, but "Droplets" is really not difficult. Some providers invent whole new languages for perfectly mundane things. Digital Ocean just brands their virtual servers in a very straightforward way.

networked 13y ago

Could someone who has used both DigitalOcean and RamNode say how they compare?

tigerweeds 13y ago
No experience with DO, but RamNode is very good. I've been a customer for over a year, and I rarely had any downtime. Disk speed is between 300MB and over 1GB (on SSD), network speed can go over 70MB/s.
disdev 13y ago
I have both RamNode and Digital Ocean servers in production. In terms of performance and cost, both are great. I haven't ever had any issues with Digital Ocean. With RamNode, they've had a couple of issues where there's been minimal downtime. And they had a breach back in June, but responded well. I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier and performance maybe slightly better.
staked 13y ago
I used RamNode for a bit last year, but left them for DO after dealing with RamNode's servers getting DDoS'd constantly. While I'm sure it happens with DO as well, at least there I don't feel like they're active participants in the various VPS provider feuds that you see all the time over at LowEndBox.

SudoAlex 13y ago

Treat DigitalOcean as any other provider - something you can't trust, so always have backups of your own data in a place you trust (not a DigitalOcean snapshot) so you can restore when needed. Personally I use Ansible http://www.ansibleworks.com/ http://www.ansibleworks.com/ and rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/ http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/, along with Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ for testing. So the day something happens with my droplet on DigitalOcean - I'll just run Ansible on a fresh server and restore the remaining data with rdiff-backup. Yes, the lack of IPv6, being unable to use a virtual machines bootloader, a lack of a decent rescue image, and no private networking apart from one location sucks. However for the price - it's a good deal.

sksk 13y ago
Would it be possible for you to describe your rdiff process a bit more? Do you dump the database periodically and backup that data or do you run rdiff on the binary data directory of your DB? Also, where is the rdiff backup data stored? I am guessing you would need another server for this and cannot be just Amazon S3? Thanks!
- SudoAlex 13y ago
  On a local server at home, it's a low powered ARM box (QNAP TS-219 running Debian) with RAID1. The same thing could probably be done with a Raspberry Pi for lower costs if I was doing it now. For database backups, you need a consistent snapshot of the data - something which might not happen if you attempt to access the data directly. Add a script to your daily crontab directory, such as: mysqldump --skip-extended-insert --all-databases --single-transaction --master-data=2 --flush-logs | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz Or: sudo -u postgres pg_dumpall | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz Into a directory which rdiff-backup will download. I always prefer to pull my backups from a local server I can trust instead of running a process on the server to push backups - if someone gains access to the server they could potentially destroy the backups if all the credentials are left on the server.
  - sksk 13y ago

simfoo 13y ago

Been using them for a few weeks now for a private Minecraft server (<= 6 people, whitelisted). Additionally it serves a statically generated map over nginx and I've been trying to get OpenVPN to work. It's a $10 one, 1 gig of RAM in Amsterdam. Generally I'm quite happy so far. The setup process and the management panel is awesome while the CPU performance is lacking a bit. I/O performance (both disk and network) is great.

cmaxwe 13y ago

The font on that site is what really sucks... :-)

JesseObrien 13y ago
I had to go in an remove the custom font CSS in chrome to get through that article. That font is absolutely terrible!
abjorn 13y ago
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed the terrible typography.
dangrossman 13y ago
There must be a reason the Chromium/Chrome team decides to displays custom fonts like that on Windows. They almost universally look terrible, or at least worse than every other browser and every other platform. No other browser renders them so thin that the lines of the glyphs become disconnected. I opened a bug report about font rendering and text color issues in 2011. Not only is narrow text rendered oddly as you can see, but if you give it any color other than black, the rendered color doesn't match the color you specify in CSS. It can be way off, like blues rendering as purple. Last I checked, the bug was still open with no work done on it.
- jahewson 13y ago
  Chrome still uses the old Win32 API (GDI) to display fonts, whereas IE and FF are now using DirectWrite.
- leephillips 13y ago
  It's been a problem since Chrome's early days, on all platforms: http://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/ http://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/
rallison 13y ago
Yup. It renders improperly on Chrome and Firefox, but properly on IE (at least, on IE10).

jpdlla 13y ago

I'm currently using Ubiquity SSD Cloud Servers and I'm happy with them, but still find it weird that its not that popular. Anyone else using them? Any difference between them and DO?

akg_67 13y ago
It is not popular because the site lists all plans sold out, i.e. no new interest in the site.
- jpdlla 13y ago
  I just noticed that and sent them a message about it. Thats definitely weird and not inviting at all. You can actually get more cloud servers once you signup.

veeti 13y ago

Are there any (decent) similar per-hour priced providers based in the EU? Any experiences or suggestions?

csmuk 13y ago
There are no decent ones. I've tried them all now. Moved to DO and have had no problems so far. TBH ALL the VPS providers are better than colo/cage suppliers from my experience who even at the high end are shit.
eCa 13y ago
I plan on setting up a vps at Gandi [0] shortly. Based on what I've heard they seem decent (not only as a domain registrar). [0] https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy
- kmike84 13y ago
  I had awful experience with Gandi several years ago: ssh was broken on a newly created server (wrong permissions for some ssh folder), and CPU was limited in a fun way: processes periodically stopped to do CPU work for 200-300ms (once each second or so). We moved to Linode (they have servers in London), and for the same price got literally 20x faster performance (measured as rps), good support and flawless setup. Of course, things might have changed since that time.

j45 13y ago

I won't use DO for everything, but I won't use Linode for everything either, and that's ok. I also use dedicated servers with VMs and they all have their place and purpose quite nicely. With tools like docker, it's less about where you're hosting and more about being able to deploy to any infrastructure, as the only guarantee you'll have for the rest of your life is you'll be redeploying somewhere, be it with the same host or another one. I think for what you pay, what you get, and the level of flexibility, DO is a great value and service in that it's not a random, small, no name vps provider that may disappear due to not managing their resources between the fine line of over or under subscribing. Where I wouldn't get a Linode and recommend someone to get shared hosting, I can start them on DO and let them grow there, so I quite like the segment they've let me introduce dedicated VPS resources to.

leddt 13y ago
Does Docker run on Digital Ocean? I tried to set it up a few months ago, without success. Maybe things have changed since. Something to do with DO using LXC with a setup that wouldn't work with Docker.
- AhtiK 13y ago
  Docker in Ubuntu 13.x has been working great for me at DO. Just have to use a recent enough kernel. DO itself is a full VM virtualization and afaik is not using kernel-level isolation/LXC.
  - neom 13y ago
    Correct, we run KVM vs some type of PID isolation or LXC. :)
  - leddt 13y ago
    Ah you are right, I must have been confused with something else. Thanks for the info!
- neom 13y ago
  It sure does! https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-docker-on-ubuntu-13-04-x64-vps https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

nodejscloud 13y ago

We https://commando.io https://commando.io use, love, and are sponsored by DigitalOcean. They've been awesome and amazing. The SliceHost of 2012/2013. Some features we really want to see are when upgrading a droplet, the ability for the disk to increase in size. Right now, you have to image it, delete it, create a new droplet from the image, and pray that you keep the same IP address. Not a suitable solution for companies relying on uptime and stability. Second, when creating a droplet, the ability to check a box, "ensure this droplet is provisioned on a different hypervisor then the rest of your droplets." Again, when building a highly available cluster, does absolutely no good if they are all on the same physical machine. Finally, the ability to attach multiple ip addresses to a single droplet is a must have. With that said, thanks DO, you guys rock!

Goopplesoft 13y ago
Commando.io rocks man! I actually use commando server management on digital ocean :) The IP thing is definitely annoying especially since you're never guaranteed an IP (say you want to switch VMs) even in the same region. That and hard drive size which has definitely made me pay more than I should (when I don't need that much CPU/RAM but need the disk space). Otherwise great experience with them.

mrbill 13y ago

For just needing an off-site VM for backup-relay-host/testing/debugging purposes, you just can't beat $5/month. Been very happy with them, and the fact that I can just throw $50 into my account and not have to worry about it for almost a year.

csmuk 13y ago

I run my web, email and some other stuff off a cheap end DO droplet for $5/month. Can't say I've had any problems other than availability of droplets in Amsterdam. I'm in the UK but have a VM in NY2. To be fair the latency feels about the same as our production kit which is 7 miles from my house, not 3460 miles. DO is less hops as well.

junto 13y ago
What are you using for email? Did you find a good install guide?
- breakall 13y ago
  I don't know about the GP, but I used the "How To Install iRedMail On Ubuntu 12.04 x64"[1] guide on Digital Ocean's community site and was pretty successful in setting up my mail server, complete with postfix, dovecot, spamassasin, greylisting, ssl/tls, webmail, etc. 1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-iredmail-on-ubuntu-12-04-x64 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...
- csmuk 13y ago
  I wrote it up the other day conveniently. Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750630 Basically, mutt, postfix, procmail.

ianbicking 13y ago

I do wish there was something akin to S3 to allow for larger amounts of storage, without necessarily being bundled in complete package that gets upgraded together (and there would be no SSD required). Obviously using S3 is still an option, but it would be nice to have the network locality and maybe even the general value proposition that DigitalOcean provides.

snoonan 13y ago
Yeah, it makes it hard for those of us with a lot of audio and video to deal with. We still need to be on Amazon for those assets, though would very much prefer to have them available through a locally mounted filesystem on our Digital Ocean instances.

bnycum 13y ago

Not seeing anyone here talk about it so maybe no one has had it happen to them, but how is everyone dealing with the disk failures? Seems like your one to two man startup could have a fun day ahead of them. Not to mention if it happened on your launch day. Coming from someone looking to use DO for a future project.

justinhj 13y ago
They do provide a backup service but personally I can rebuild everything from a github repo if it does go down.
Lazare 13y ago
Use something like Ansible (Puppet, Salt, Chef, whatever) to provision your servers, along with backups. You can also use DO disk images but they're not as good a solution; my Ansible playbooks will let me configure and deploy a fully functioning app or db server instance at the drop of a hat, on almost any infrastructure; a DO image is only good for deploying onto DO infrastructure. If you're "in the cloud" (or hell, even if you're using your own bare iron servers), you need to be accepting that your server could just go away at any time (and Murphy's Law being what it is, probably at the worst possible time). The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :)
- elithrar 13y ago
  > The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :) Exactly this. My little side project is fairly minimal, but users are paying for services. If the site goes down before my next backup, I'm going to have to reverse some charges (and look bad in the process!). One option might/would be to run failover on a $5 droplet, but then I also need to cluster Redis (server-side sessions), etc, etc... and it starts to become an "operations" side project and not a "product" side project. I'm using Puppet to automate the build process (and will build a "hot spare" image to get things up faster), but backups and failover are still tricky problems to solve.

Thaxll 13y ago

You still can't boot your own kernel...

Nux 13y ago
"yum install kernel" then modify grub.conf?
- tshtf 13y ago
  Nope. DigitalOcean's has been ignoring customer requests about this for 18 months on this: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader-?page=1&per_page=20 https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce... It's really hard to take them seriously when you have to wait patiently for kernel updates that include critical security fixes.
  - Nux 13y ago
    OMG!
perryh2 13y ago
What are some use cases that you have for running your own kernel? I just can't think of much need of running a custom kernel. There's a lot of different kernel versions to choose from. For subsystems like process scheduling, you can just load your own kernel module to change that.
- yrro 13y ago
  Their kernels are all months out of date. And besides, I want to install updates as they are released by my distribution, rather than have to wait around for my host to get their arse in gear.

viraptor 13y ago

What I'm really looking forward to is better IP management. So far it looks like most cloud servers providers try to ignore the issue, which I'm really disappointed about. It looks like DO's answer to droplet failures is - set up a load balancer. OK, but what happens is that droplet disappears? What protection can I have against going completely offline for the duration of DNS TTL in that case? (And the time of manually changing it) I see that as an unacceptable risk really - one thing that keeps me from using DO. Other services also lack the reserved IPS sometimes, but some of them at least provide an integrated solution (LBaaS style).

CSDude 13y ago

I use DigitalOcean, my application is not very large but response time is important. 20 GB is more than enough for me, even 10 GB would be enough. Being it SSD, it runs the short lived disk-based tasks I give (compilation & copying moving files) very fast due to its SSD, compared to AWS and others. This is my usecase and I am happy with it.

johnpowell 13y ago

Yesterday I went to pay my bill and it said "Automated Abuse Detection - Account Verification". Luckily I was able to ftp in and do a back-up. After some back and forth my account was reinstated. It wasn't a huge deal but a shitty way to start my day. And after asking multiple times I was never told the reason why I had to go through this. I had been happy until now. This just left a bad taste in my mouth. edit: What pissed me off was having to send in a copy of my government issued ID.

jzwinck 13y ago
How would you like them to handle it? Fraud and abuse is a big problem, and government ID is a standard way to sort out who is who.
- johnpowell 13y ago
  Telling me why I was suspected of fraud and abuse would be a good start. Another edit: I got a helpful reply. There has been a response to your ticket: Greetings, Unfortunately, we are unable to provide further information with regard to our backend abuse filters. If we may be of any further assistance, please do let us know. Regards, * Mitchell | Support Team
  - devicenull 13y ago
    You really can't think of any possible reason why they wouldn't want to tell you what triggered their fraud checks? Because it's pretty obvious to me that people would create throwaway accounts to probe for all the fraud checks, then start creating abusive accounts.
    - johnpowell 13y ago
      Well. I have paid for around a year. I would like to know what happened so I can avoid the same in the future. Like I said there was no communication and I worry that my sites will be shut down for no reason.
- 13y ago

ilaksh 13y ago

The title is very stupid especially since he is actually giving them a recommendation. Anyway it comes down to the fact that its cheaper than any other large provider out there and almost always works very well. No one can beat that price with an actual usable service. If I was going to complain about anything it would be the current lack of 2GB/4GB etc. droplets in San Francisco and the fact that launching a droplet from a smaller snapshot takes several minutes instead of one minute.

renang 13y ago

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.84315 s, 279 MB/s I was expecting it too be faster, actually. I get over 300 MB/s on a VPS with HDD at the company I work at. [1] [1] https://true.nl https://true.nl

joosters 13y ago
The dd command is copying from /dev/zero I wouldn't entirely trust any disk benchmark writing empty files, you might be running into some FS optimisations there. And 300MB/s on a single spinning disk? No chance!

icelancer 13y ago

I am pleased with DO but they overpromise way too often, or at least they used to. We were supposed to be able to install instances from ISO in 2012 as promised by their support tickets: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3276477-allow-custom-images http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... It was last updated ONE YEAR AGO. Come on, that is outrageous.

shan199105 13y ago

I want to say that I hate Digital Ocean as well. I am a University of Waterloo Computer Science student. I have CS 458 (computer security) this term. We had an assignment last month asking us to get all the users permission without knowing their password for a web app. Then I wrote a script. The use of the script is to use curl one time per second (may be longer, due to the connection issue) to guess all the different combination of the password. Of course I was using that script on Digital Ocean! After running it two days, I receive an email saying their router find out that I was doing the DDOS and ask me to stop it. I stop the script immediately and reply them my reason telling them that I was doing it for University Assignment and I don't know that I was not allowed to do this. However, my account got suspends anyway. No matter how I send emails to beg them to give back my files in the server (I use the server for emacs and tmux to write codes for school projects), they just told me that sorry but my account is suspend. No matter how I beg them, all I received back from the email is just a max two line saying that my account is suspend. They do tell me that it suspends forever. After several days they deleted my account with all my files in it. Now I have no ways to get any of my files back! I feel ... so angry and hate so much about the digital ocean. Is this how a normal American Company does? Will a normal American Company suspends customers account because that customer use it to do university work? I can understand it suspends me if I violate any laws but I was just doing an assignment and not violates anything. It also ignore the apology from the customer. Any evidence the customer provides is ignored gets well. Even that after couple days, digital ocean deleted that customer's account with all his files permanently! This is my story. This is the reason why I hate Digital Ocean!!!!!!

oahziur 13y ago
well, this should be another case that digital ocean sucks. bad customer services plus not return important files after suspend.
- mikeyen 13y ago
  I like to see DO put a process in place to resolve this kind of issue by require the user to have recorded Skype/google hangout session to verify I'd, credit card, etc. once the id is verified, face recorded , user is understand and agree fix the ddos type errors, the account should be restored.

mediaserf 13y ago

I use ksplice to run my own OS & kernel on Digital Ocean, you don't have to stick with their templates.

pritambaral 13y ago
Do you ksplice-patch your kernels on every boot?

cauliturtle 13y ago

with the first 3 points of the cons, no doubt to use DO rather than other cloud service for small/personal stuffs

eschulte 13y ago

I don't use digital ocean because https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updates-for-arch-linux https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updat...

amree 13y ago

I'm still waiting for a data center in Asia

zzzaim 13y ago
Me too. Curious, have you tried using the US data centers from Asia? If so, how is the speed like?
- amree 13y ago
  Ping result shows that I'm getting around 200ms (from Malaysia)
- thepoet 13y ago
  It's about 250ms from India

jbverschoor 13y ago

Unresponsive droplets here

kenkam 13y ago

You know Disqus has taken over English when OP asks us to disquss on Hacker News.

BrokenPipe 13y ago

I really dislike DigitalOcean. Terrible customer services. And do not give them a way to bill you automatically, use something like paypal when YOU are in control and can just not buy the credit and run out.

damell 13y ago

Thanks for the opinion. I have been considering moving my server to DigitalOcean for a while and this assured me I probably won't regret it

fruks 13y ago

Feels like a perfect place to host your hobby projects but nothing for serious business

evanprodromou 13y ago

I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean; great value and good quality. If I had any complaint, it's that occasionally I get a droplet with a wonky IP address that seems to be shared with another host (like, the SSH host key wobbles between one and the other between invocations of ssh). There was also some flakiness with NYC2 a couple of weeks ago, which caused some sadness and grief. All in all, they're saving me multiple thousands of dollars.

pearjuice 13y ago

What's with all the outdated OS images on DigitalOcean?