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In 2016, is DigitalOcean safe to use for production?

21 points by 1123581321 ↗ HN
A correlating question is: how do you evaluate the production-readiness of a VM provider?

We currently run several applications on a large SingleHop server and are not happy with service interruptions, cpanel, and the downsides of applications having to share some configuration.

7 comments

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tshtf
1. Does the provider keep their promises?

Digital Ocean promised IPv6 support and the ability to run custom kernels several years before they provided this support.

2. Is the networking secure?

The "Private IP" addresses in Digital Ocean are accessible to anyone in the same zone.

3. Will they cover your ass?

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/nra-complaint-takes-down-3...

_RPM
Yeah, it's basically a 10.0.0.0/8 network where any VM can talk to anyone in their same subnet. You'd have to do some iptables work in order to "lock down" your private net.
api
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have never added IPv6 support years and years after saying they were "working on it."
taf2
From 2011 aws elb and dns have supported IPv6 [0]. For most websites this is really nice way to support IPv6, IMO

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/05/24/elb-ip...

api
Not everything is a web site.

Also personally I find V6 more useful under the fold. For a gateway it's nice to support but doesn't give you anything. In your intranet it makes address conflicts go away forever and lets everything autoscale with zero configuration. This can be done with V4 but less conveniently and with more complexity under the hood (and therefore more things to break).

MalcolmDiggs
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any single-provider that allays all concerns. Redundancy is the name of game. Any single-point-of-failure (in this case, a hosting company) is a bad idea.

Pick 2 hosting solutions you like (I'd recommend checking out AWS, Linode, Rackspace, and GCP), and build your systems redundantly on both. If they don't share infrastructure/datacenters, the odds of them both failing at the same time are small enough that it's not worth worrying about.

kull
Using them for the last 6 months. Running 10 multi-connected droplets with each running multiple cron jobs. We are a fast growing ecommerce SAAS startup. Just in case, we keep a good backup of everything on AWS. But DO is something we are recommending!