
Ask HN: 6 months later, DigitalOcean still Sucks... Why do you use them? - mdewinter
I wrote an article 6 months ago: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raymii.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;articles&#x2F;Digital_Ocean_Sucks._Use_Digital_Ocean.html<p>Nothing about the points has changed. No IPv6, no custom kernels, no own OS installs.<p>Please tell me why you still use Digital Ocean? Me? Just the price. However, I have several VPS&#x27;s at other providers just to run *BSD or to have IPv6...
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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.

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

 _Click_ _Click_.

"And it's up and running."

That's the main reason :)

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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"?

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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.

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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".

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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...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-it-possible-to-
install-a-bsd-os)

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

[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3232571-support-
bsd-os)

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

[https://www.vultr.com/faq/](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...

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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.

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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).

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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jbrooksuk
Personally, I don't need a custom kernel or self-OS install. IPv6 doesn't
change much for me either.

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billrobertson42
Do they do something that precludes you from overwriting the boot sector of
the VM to install a custom OS?

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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...

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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...

