Should I switch to Digital Ocean?

Chris

The performance on Digital Ocean is.. alright. I do believe you get what you pay for in that you're not getting ripped off. I use DO for lots of small projects and non-critical things. I've lost DO droplets in the past and the backups I had weren't recoverable - but they've since switched the way they do backups so hopefully that's a thing of the past.

I'm somewhat of a webhosting junkie in that I am always watching and using everything else that's out there as I offer hosting and VPS' myself. I have about 8 active digital ocean droplets, I have a couple of rackspace VPS', and I even have a ramnode pure-ssd plan. Out of all of the servers, ramnode actually performs the best. For SSD storage, DO's io is actually very very low so they're probably overselling the storage but because it's ssd it usually still comes up ahead of typical platter based storage.

For the price, it's pretty hard to go wrong with DO. I've had more network outages (very short lived when it does happen) with DO than any other provider I've ever had in the past, but again for what you're paying you definitely get your moneys worth.

julian

@Chris said:

I've had more network outages (very short lived when it does happen) with DO than any other provider I've ever had in the past, but again for what you're paying you definitely get your moneys worth.

Can definitely relate to this. DO does go down from time to time, but for the money we're paying, I honestly can't complain.

finid

@julian

My DOs are on the NY2 center and I've never had my server go down.

julian

The only "long" (being 30+ mins) outage I had was for SF-1: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/495/-14-01-2014-outage-in-sf-1-server

luke

I use DO for all my websites. Never had an issue with them, no downtime or anything that I've noticed. It was a hurdle learning how to set up and manage a VPS, but I got it done and I like my setup a lot better now than what I had before (HostGator, then Hawkhost). I've got 6 websites on my 512MB droplet, 3 forums and 3 WordPress sites, and my webstack is composed of Debian 7 x64, nginx, php-fpm, and Maria DB for SQL.

If you do decide to make the jump and learn how to set things up and migrate, I recommend you learn how to use the scp command which will save you a lot of time downloading your old data and uploading it to your VPS. Also, use Mailgun or Mandrill as an SMTP server for your sites that need to send email, because using sendmail doesn't work very well and setting up your own mail server can be a major pain.

Feel free to send me a chat on here if you have any questions or need help during your move if you decide to move.

finid

@lukelarris said:

Also, use Mailgun or Mandrill as an SMTP server for your sites that need to send email, because using sendmail doesn't work very well and setting up your own mail server can be a major pain.

Actually, if it's just for scripts to send email, all you need to do is install Postfix (and mailx). You don't need to set up an email server or use a 3rd party email provider. You certainly don't need to install Sendmail.

luke

@planner haven't tried those, but thanks. Will save that info for next time.

erich

Thanks for all the useful information. I decided to play around with the droplets and it's interesting!

jonathanmh

I have multiple droplets on DO and I'm very, very happy with them until now!

Jack WAUGH

Clients of my client, lawyers, refused Digital Ocean's user agreement, but accepted that of Linode.

julian

@waugh That's an interesting perspective, I wonder what it was in DO's user agreement that they disagreed with?

Jack WAUGH

@julian They judge that DO claims rights to do things with user content, like publishing it, beyond reason, and it's too much to the potential disadvantage to the user.