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Ask HN: 6 months later, DigitalOcean still Sucks... Why do you use them?

12 points by mdewinter ↗ HN
I wrote an article 6 months ago: https://raymii.org/s/articles/Digital_Ocean_Sucks._Use_Digital_Ocean.html

Nothing about the points has changed. No IPv6, no custom kernels, no own OS installs.

Please tell me why you still use Digital Ocean? Me? Just the price. However, I have several VPS's at other providers just to run *BSD or to have IPv6...

30 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 70.9 ms ] thread
bananas
We don't still use it - gone to Linode. At 4x the base price it's still a better deal especially now they have SSDs.

I'd use bigv.io for BSD

lsllc
I've been looking for somewhere to host FreeBSD (without much luck!). Their site doesn't mention FreeBSD and their set up cmd line tool only seems to list Linux distros; although they have a "none" option!

Have you tried *BSD with bigv.io?

jbrooksuk
Personally, I don't need a custom kernel or self-OS install. IPv6 doesn't change much for me either.
LoganCale
I use them because I don't need any of those things and they work great for what I do need, at a great price.
anthony_franco
$5/month is great for little weekend projects or simple static sites. It's also fun to see how much traffic you can handle on constrained resources.

But for for anything serious I'm using Linode or Rimuhosting.

mdewinter
What do you consider "anything serious"?
anthony_franco
Anything that has customers and is making real money. Basically when the potential slowness/downtime concern outweighs the cost savings. My usual process has been:

cheap VPS -> Rimuhosting VPS -> Rimuhosting dedicated server

Similar when hosting a WordPress marketing site, I start off with a cheap, DreamHost shared account. Then move it to WPEngine as it grows.

agildehaus
Plenty of people who don't use IPv6, need custom kernels, or install their own OS.
mdewinter
IPv6 is the future. Even DO will run out of IPv4 addresses eventually, then what? I have Ipv6 at home, it suprises me how many sites are available over Ipv6... Just not my DO projects...
whatthemick
The price is great. I love heroku for the easy setup of web facing servers but i'm in the process of moving my workers to DigitalOcean, way more value for money.

Not being able to install a custom OS is a minor annoyance, hopefully they will add CoreOS soon. (Currently i'm quite happy with Ubuntu though).

solomone
Cheap, easy and extremely helpful tutorials. My biggest complaint is a lack of load balancer.
mdewinter
The tutorials work on any VPS probably. And, the load balancer part, you can build that yourself with a boatload of solutions like haproxy, nginx and whatnot...
solomone
Sure, but you still have a single point of failure.
anthony_franco
Wouldn't the hosting provider's load balancer also be a single point of failure? Unless they also have a backup which is easy to do yourself as well.

Just wanted to make sure I was understanding.

Wouter33
Could be. But Digital Ocean does not provide you with a movable IP that you could point at a different load balancer when the old one becomes faulty. With a movable IP or a cloud based load balancer a single point of failure could be prevented. DO does not offer any of them.
anthony_franco
I see, it's the movable IP that's the issue. Thanks for the clarification.
junto
Quite honestly, as a UNIX noob, the step by step tutorials were priceless.

I know that Linode have these tutorials now too, but I actually have no idea how to easily move my installation from one server to the other!

Any tips?

mdewinter
Using a deployment/orchestration framework like Ansible or Chef allows you to define the server setup once and roll it out many times everywhere. You might want to take a look at that.
thenomad
The poster above mentions being a UNIX noob.

My admittedly limited experience with the various deployment frameworks out there implies that they're not particularly noob-friendly.

Chef, for example, will do the job (I think), but I'd anticipate someone who was relatively new to Linux and, for example, didn't know Ruby, needing a weekend to figure out how to move a basic installation of a webapp from one VM to another.

That's a bit of a leap from DO's "save snapshot, done".

cabbeer
Seriously, the reason I went with Digital Ocean was because of their tutorial on how to get Ghost running.
dagw
Most of my projects don't need IPv6, custom kernels or custom OS installs. They need nice and cheap Debian boxes that I can spin up and shut down as and when I need them.

That being said I also use EC2 a lot to do things that DO can't, so best tool for the job and all that.

thenomad
"Right, need a new server to demo the webapp on."

Click Click.

"And it's up and running."

That's the main reason :)

billrobertson42
Do they do something that precludes you from overwriting the boot sector of the VM to install a custom OS?
S4M
Can you give a concrete example where you would need to run a custom kernel? For security reasons?
mdewinter
Gentoo with grsecurity for example, but also just experimenting. For example, with kernel compiling. Booting Ubuntu 12.04 from a 14.04 kernel is always fun. Or, to run Arch. They are deprecating Arch now because of high maintenance, but that is just because they use images instead of letting the OS boot its own kernel...
lsllc
FreeBSD hosting is an issue for me, neither D.O. or Linode offer it officially (although supposedly it's possible with Linode).

According to Etel Sverdlov Digital Ocean is working to add * BSD, but that was from Oct 2012:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-it-possi...

You can vote for * BSD on Digital Ocean's user voice here:

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...

EDIT: Looks like Vultr offers FreeBSD for $5/month:

https://www.vultr.com/faq/

mdewinter
That's the same thing I have... They promise a lot, however the only new thing added is a HTML 5 console and some Ubuntu 14.04 images. Oh, and 2 new datacenters, which do not apply to me... But come on, it is really not that hard...
munimkazia
I don't think it sucks, for what it offers at that price. I use a DO boxes to host some basic php websites, and as the app server for my node app.
lugg
Similar use case here. Same opinion, I wanted aws style instancing with basic api operations available without all the hidden costs and complexity of aws.

For anything more complicated you probably will run into issues, but honestly it would also complicate everything for everyone else.

Op doesn't really look like target audience.

Finding this digital ocean sucks claim a bit link baity considering the argument.

27182818284
>No IPv6, no custom kernels, no own OS installs.

Don't need it. I used to build my own kernels and blah blah blah years ago, but where I'm at now in life, it doesn't come up.