
DigitalOcean Sucks. Use DigitalOcean - mdewinter
https://raymii.org/s/articles/Digital_Ocean_Sucks._Use_Digital_Ocean.html
======
nodejscloud
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
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.

------
nwh
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.

~~~
larrys
"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
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.

~~~
larrys
If they were simply differentiating between different levels of servers then I
would agree. (Just like people call things "gold" "bronze" "silver" etc.)

But while it is an easy word (and it's "cute") it is different and strictly
for branding over something that already is well understood and known. Why do
it?

~~~
aioprisan
This is no different that amazon EC2 naming servers "instances"

~~~
tbrownaw
You are in a maze of twisty little rooms, all alike.

"Instance" has a very well defined meaning, which leads to some standard
implications.

It means one particulate <thing> out of several, which are all alike. It
implies that your <thing>, and in fact all <thing>s, has (have) no physical
reality. It implies that <thing>s can be created and destroyed at will.

It is also completely generic. You can have EC2 instances, ${APPLICATION}
instances, object instances (in absolutely any object-oriented language, and
several that aren't), database instances, etc.

A virtual private server is a cheap knock-off of a real physical server. A
server instance is something you get from an API instead of having to hire a
guy to plug things in.

~~~
aioprisan
In the context of servers, I have never seen other web hosting platforms use
the term "instance," in the context of on-demand server instance vs. just give
me a server. While it seems commonplace now, I don't recall reading about
other hosting platforms referring to their services as instances. Can you
point to literature that does? For instance, from
[http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-
types/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) : "You can think of
instances as virtual servers that can run applications." That's the AWS
context of instances.

------
neom
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.

~~~
IgorPartola
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
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. :)

~~~
IgorPartola
That's great to hear. I actually envision a situation where the allocation of
the /48 would be per-customer or per-customer-per-datacenter. That way I could
do things like firewall off hosts easily. For example I could tell my DB hosts
to only allow incoming connections from my /48 and nothing else. Having no
common prefix for all my droplets would make this harder where I would have to
list all allowed hosts.

I definitely appreciate that DO is doing things the right way and that this
isn't going to be a rollout of "well, this host on this router supports IPv6,
but that load balancer upstream does not".

~~~
stephen_g
This sounds like the way to do it - being able to get a /48 for every data
centre and then being able to use addresses and subnets out of that, or a
separate /64 for each droplet.

I wonder if we could eventually get virtual routers between subnets without
having to use droplets (like the virtual networking that VMWare/OpenStack are
doing)

------
SudoAlex
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.

~~~
bigiain
Yep - I'm also using Ansible and Vagrant, in conjunction with machines on my
home network, reverse ssh tunnels, and API manageable DNS. I'm working towards
having services able to be dynamically/automatically moved between various VPS
providers (Digital Ocean/AWS/Hetzner/NineFold) without me worrying (or even
being aware) which VPS provider is currently being used.

~~~
legutierr
How would you do it in such a way that you are not even aware?

~~~
bigiain
The plan is a mail server where the hardware/storage is in my home, opening
reverse ssh tunnels for ports 25 and 465 to inexpensive VPSes regularly
created and destroyed via APIs, with DNS MX records updated automatically.
That way my world-visible MX endpoint will regularly change IP address, and
move between US, European, and Australian based datacenters. The VPSes are
configured to not store or log anything, and to always attempt to initiate
SSL/TLS connection (with STARTSSL SMTP messages).

I'll know which VPS providers I have accounts with (and anybody curious could
also find out by watching my zonefile updates), but at any time I won't care
where the remote end of the ssh tunnels is or where the MX records are
currently pointing.

~~~
legutierr
OK, so you are using these systems as data relays, not to store data. This
makes sense. I think it would be much harder to do this if you wanted to
switch between VPSs that were storing your data.

~~~
bigiain
Sure.

I've done some thinking - but not (yet) experimenting with EncFS combined with
S3FS to store encrypted mountable data on Amazon S3 (I'm currently useing
EncFS to store data on Dropbox & GDrive and with BTSync). No good if you need
fast local access to the data (you wouldn't want to run you database this
way), but it would solve _some_ of those problems. For me right now - the
answer is to store my own data at home, and relay access to that data when
needed.

------
fakeanon
"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
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.

------
icelancer
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-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/3276477-allow-custom-images)

It was last updated ONE YEAR AGO. Come on, that is outrageous.

------
ianbicking
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
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.

------
johnpowell
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
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
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
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
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.

------
matiasb
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
We addressed this as soon as it was brought to our attention and is no longer
a vulnerability. :)

------
batbomb
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.

------
ilaksh
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.

------
csmuk
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
What are you using for email? Did you find a good install guide?

~~~
breakall
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-
insta...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-
iredmail-on-ubuntu-12-04-x64)

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

~~~
dangrossman
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
Chrome still uses the old Win32 API (GDI) to display fonts, whereas IE and FF
are now using DirectWrite.

------
Kalki
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.

~~~
marveller
Agree, I am also running out of disk space now, don't need additional RAM or
CPU power.

~~~
mikeyen
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?

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

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

~~~
perryh2
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
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.

------
karmicthreat
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
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
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
Totally, however a lot of our install base tend not to be as technical. The
disparity between devs is getting massive.

~~~
rgj
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.

~~~
Xylakant
Then everybody will assume he's technical enough and still flood the trackers
with issues that are more of a pebkac than a real problem. It would probably
end up like the dev-builds of IOs7: People were downvoting apps because they
crashed, even though it was impossible for the app authors to rectify the
problems.

------
CSDude
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.

------
j45
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
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
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
Correct, we run KVM vs some type of PID isolation or LXC. :)

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

~~~
clone1018
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
I'm guessing it has something to do with EU data privacy laws.

~~~
staked
It's because DO only offers internal/private networking in their NYC2
datacenter and thus not available in the AMS center.

------
mrbill
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.

------
threeio
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 ;)

------
viraptor
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).

------
simfoo
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.

------
luos
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).

------
evanprodromou
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.

------
bnycum
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.

~~~
Lazare
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
> 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.

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

~~~
pritambaral
Do you ksplice-patch your kernels on every boot?

------
tlongren
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.

------
renang

      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
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!

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

~~~
tigerweeds
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.

------
BrokenPipe
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.

------
jpdlla
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
It is not popular because the site lists all plans sold out, i.e. no new
interest in the site.

~~~
jpdlla
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.

------
damell
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

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

~~~
neom
I wouldn't say it's not on our radar. ;)

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

~~~
eCa
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
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.

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

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

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

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amree
I'm still waiting for a data center in Asia

~~~
zzzaim
Me too. Curious, have you tried using the US data centers from Asia? If so,
how is the speed like?

~~~
amree
Ping result shows that I'm getting around 200ms (from Malaysia)

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

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jbverschoor
Unresponsive droplets here

------
shan199105
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!!!!!!

~~~
bigiain
As another Digital Ocean user - I'll just say I'm happy to hear that other
people running DDOS and/or dictionary attacks from the same IP pool I'm
relying on get slapped down _hard_, and that excuses like "but I'm doing this
for a Uni assignment!" don't give you a free run to be a bad actor in their
(and "my") netblock.

Do you _really_ think you have a "right" to run a dictionary attack from
someone else's network? _Seriously?_

Personally - from looking at my fail2ban logs, I wish Amazon - and even more
usefully, large residential cable/adsl providers - would implement this sort
of pro-active monitoring of user/customer behavior.

~~~
shan199105
Sorry that I didn't read your post carefully. I did not know that I cannot run
a dictionary attack from their network. I admit that I made the mistake. I do
tell them that I was wrong and stop the script immediately after I receive the
notice. It's just I do not think that I deserve a penalty with destroy my
account and all my files.

~~~
bigiain
So what penalty do you think you deserve?

What penalty do the people attacking my clients' WordPress sites or SSH ports
deserve? Would that penalty change if they mailed Digital Ocean saying "No,
it's OK - me attacking that website is part of my Uni assignment!"? Who'd be
responsible for checking that claim, and how much time would it take? And
remind me again how much you'd spent with Digital Ocean?

You fucked up big time - deal with it and learn from it. There's clearly a
whole bunch of things you didn't even think about before doing this (ad that
you're still whining about and failing to accept responsibility for). Be glad
it bit you on the ass for something as unimportant as a uni assignment -
imagine how much worse this could be if instead of a few assignment files,
you'd lost 6 months of your startup's code - because you hadn't bothered
reading the TOS you agreed to and didn't bother keeping off-site copies of
important files.

Sorry this is harsh - but seriously, think about this from anybody else but
your perspective. You behaved like a jerk, then tried the "But I didn't know!
Sorry, I'll stop now." justification. And you're _still_ whining that you're
being treated unfairly.

