

DigitalOcean Wants To Challenge Amazon, Linode With Focus On Simplicity - raiyu
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/digitalocean-wants-to-challenge-amazon-linode-and-co-with-better-prices-marketing-and-focus-on-simplicity/

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whalesalad
I run a handful of boxes on Digital Ocean. Unfortunately, until they provide
an internal-networking feature, they're not going to be able to seriously
compete with Linode and others.

Vertical scaling is easy ... just reboot your node into a higher tier. I build
apps horizontally though, distributing tasks to various machines. Example, a
web/app tier of boxes, a tier of database machines, etc... and all those need
to communicate on an internal network for speed and security.

They're working on it:

[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/3020028-private-back-end-network-support)

But they really need to give this some more attention.

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cpursley
Is anyone using DigitalOcean with Cloud66? I've had my eye on this combo for a
while. Otherwise, I might dive in to Chef.

Any recommendations for provisioning DigitalOcean servers?

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late2part
I tried Digital Ocean. Their SSD backed servers didn't perform for me as well
as Amazon's PIOPS EBS, so the allure quickly faded.

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DojoKing
That wasn't an article. That was an ad. Nice to see TechCrunch still takes
paychecks for fluff pieces.

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mitchwainer
We wish. If that was the case, we would keep paying them. :)

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dbond
The only thing I really miss when not using AWS is security groups, iptables
isn't hard to use but its nice to have this as a simple external service.

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simpsond
Remotely modifying iptables terrifies me.

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wil421
They have an option to log in to the command via a web interface in case you
block yourself.

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mzarate06
I'm currently test driving Digital Ocean, ServGrid, and Linode.

Digitial Ocean makes provisioning new servers incredibly easy (as does
Linode). The process is near instant. Scaling a server up and down is also
near instant, especially compared to Rackspace (it took over an hour the last
time I scaled a server down with them).

But their network has proven the least reliable (I'm in their NY DC). My site
monitors have reported a few outages, anywhere from 1 - 6 minutes a piece. By
comparison, ServGrid and Linode haven't had any outages during my trial.

But their customer support is really fast, and I love the documentation and
community they have around their offerings. I really wish they had a Dallas DC
though.

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mschalle
Unfortunately network reliability is also an issue in the SF zone. Apparently
they replaced some routers 2 weeks ago, but that hasn't solved the issues
entirely. Over the past 2 weeks I've had easily over 30 minutes of downtime.
During this downtime no pings / web requests can connect, nor can any SSH
connections, so I'm fairly confident it's a loss of connectivity on their end.

Regardless, I'm still happy with the service and the pricing, and will
continue to use them in the hopes of the network issues improving.

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euroclydon
Do any of the hosting providers bake Chef or Puppet or the like right into
their management consoles? I just use a custom bash file that I wrote,
borrowing from some Linode Stack Scripts, to get my bare instances up to
speed. An improvement on Stack Scripts, that were more up to date, and didn't
feel like drinking the puppet-chef-cool-aid would be a cool feature.

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vosper
AWS has recently added "OpsWorks" which is essentially Chef integrated with
AWS. I played with it and it has a nice interface and good tutorials, but
what's actually going on under the hood was a little mysterious.

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gregf
It should be noted they are using a really old version of chef, and most
cookbooks won't work it.

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akg_67
Recently, I have been looking into DO to move my site from shared hosting. I
wish they had prepackaged LAMP Droplets to speed up migration.

Is anyone using DO with MariaDB, PHP, and Python? Also, are there any
restrictions on what can't be installed on droplets? For example, numpy,
scipy, R.

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fendale
You get root on the droplet, so I'm pretty sure you can install whatever you
want. I run a couple of rails apps on a 512mb droplet and it works great. Very
low traffic on my sites.

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akg_67
Thanks for the info. My site also has low traffic. The site sucks up lot of
CPU and Memory during processing and large DB tables. It is primarily data
analytics driven and does lot of dM/ML work. I will try out DO.

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backwardm
I've used many of the top VPS providers: Slicehost, Rackspace, Linode, Digital
Ocean and AWS. I don't think anyone could beat Amazon at making the process of
provisioning a fresh server instance more complex. Granted, this is from the
perspective of someone using their web interface to do so. Digital Ocean has
made that same process incredibly easy and kinda fun.

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cmwelsh
Sometimes I wonder if Amazon is purposely limiting their target audience to
technical users by implementing their AWS UI in a manner that the average
person cannot understand.

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jcastro
They likely don't care about one off people who fire up instances via the web
UI, they want the kind of company that will ask for hundreds and thousands
over their API.

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dallagi
Is FreeBSD supported?

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JeremyMorgan
The first one to successfully do this will definitely get me to open my
wallet.

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gregf
AWS has freebsd.

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cynix
But you have to pay the Windows tax on most instance types if you want to use
FreeBSD.

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gregf
I think you should go look at ec2 pricing. Linux/BSD instances are cheaper to
run per hour than there windows counter parts.

Scroll down a page or so to view the pricing charts.

[https://aws.amazon.com/windows/](https://aws.amazon.com/windows/)
[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

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cynix
The FreeBSD images can only be run on Windows instances (except for a few
expensive instance types). That's why I said you have to pay the Windows tax
if you want to run FreeBSD on EC2.

