I was wondering about bandwidth limit of their VPS, and found this in their pricing page:
> We don’t charge for bandwidth. You’ll save a ton of money with our network and it's easy to get started. No need to figure out how much bandwidth you’re going to use, whether that traffic is in or out. Set your site up and pay no extra if it takes off.
Whenever I see statement like this I'm not sure whether I should trust it; what if I use 1 TB/month, would I get kicked out for "using too much bandwidth"? What's your real soft cap?
We are figuring out what the soft cap will be based on our customers usage and averaging that out, right now we are considering something in the 2TB-5TB range.
Honestly we just didn't prioritize traffic accounting as other features were a priority =]
We're big on listening to customer feedback so we're going to address that issue sooner rather than later. =]
When bandwidth pricing is introduced it will be in line with the pricing that we have for SSD/512MB servers so it will still be one of the lowest in the industry, that much is guaranteed.
Thanks! Seeing "unlimited" bandwidth is actually a deal breaker for me and may other people.
Even if you mean it in all sincerity, when I see that, what I assume is that there's a secret hidden limit, and I can't know what it is. So that means the site is instantly useless, no matter how good of a deal it might have otherwise been!
An thought-experiment example I've given otherplaces - Let's say I start a site called DevUrandom.org - It has an API which pushes out network-limited random bits.
I fire up computers around the world, and have them filling up their crypto systems using DevUrandom.org, at 100Mbit/sec.
Is that OK?
What if I love the service so much, I spin up 100 such boxes?
etc, etc.
It's not that your service doesn't sound awesome, it's just that if I'm going to rely on it, I don't want it pulled away for arbitrary reasons, because I hit a double-secret limit. I'd rather know what's OK and what's not OK going in.
Further, it aligns our interests- If I'm paying you, for the things that cost you money, I have an incentive to minimize them! If you have to pay for it, and I don't, I'll do whatever's easiest for me, and not bother spending time/money to reduce bandwidth.
(A classic example of this is seen in with Landlords/Tenants - Tenants pay for Electricity, but Landlords generally buy appliances. This means that Landlords have little incentive to buy energy efficient appliances.. They won't be paying for the energy anyway)
Thank you for being so transparent. I'm impressed at how easy it is to spin up a new VPS and network link from Bangkok to your New York data center isn't very bad either. :)
Tempting, but no IPv6. That's a deal breaker for infrastructure. I don't want to have to revisit machines later.
I'm also a little nervous about the unlimited bandwidth. That seems like it will attract bulk data movers that could affect my traffic. There is no mention of fairness, link utilization, or any kind of traffic allocation policy. I could benchmark it today, but that doesn't help me tomorrow.
Still, interesting enough to add to the list of options with the next project.
IPv6 is slated for sometime later in 2013, we've had a lot of customers request it and probably closer to Spring / Summer we will be testing it.
As for unlimited bandwidth that is something we offered because we didn't have time to write bandwidth accounting and wanted to focus development on the core service more, we figured that was more important for us in the short run.
We will be switching to paid bandwidth in the future and offering bundled packages with each server and then a simple flat per GB price after that.
I tried this service, support was a 5+ hour response time commonly. Latency was terrible and they had DNS issues they refused to acknowledge, I was even issued a 5$ credit, however they still didn't acknowledge their issues. I was also billed metered when I should have been a monthly customer, this being said I will never use any of their services or parent companies services in the future.
Sorry to hear about your experience as a growing start-up we definitely run into issues with growth.
We do not offer monthly plans, everything is on a per-usage basis except we default to a monthly price to keep billing simpler for our users, so that was just a misunderstanding on billing.
As for DNS we offered it as a new service in labs, because we were testing it with our customers and improving it based on their feedback. And Im sure if you opened up tickets regarding it, it helped us track down bugs.
What underlying hypervisor/server technology is this service using? Looks really interesting... I'm using Rackspace Cloud Servers now. It's been Great! But gets expensive fast if you have to scale...
I signed up for a free trial this morning when I had a few minutes, but won't be able to do anything with it for the next few days. I am starting to get messages that my account will self-destruct if I don't give it my credit card information in the next two hours.
I really don't like "free trials" that require you to have a cc on file, with the promise of not charging it. Believe me, if I decide to build anything meaningful on this platform, I will transition to a paid account.
Is the free trial really only 3 hours if I don't give you my cc information?
It is one of our most up-voted features and we will begin building out storage solutions this month now that our SSD/RAM upgrades are finished.
We are still deciding whether to roll out first some sort of block/tiered NFS storage that can be mounted or something API driven like S3, so feedback is welcome.
Unless it's HA-NFS, which is very difficult, I'd say S3-like.
I'm about to sign up for the 2GB box since my 512MB VPS at Linode isn't enough memory to really make Play framework fly and upgrading gets very expensive fast.
Despite being a long time (and happy!) Linode user, the prices and SSD are just too interesting to pass over.
I'm running a small Zarafa based mail server on a 2GB plan with Linode and it could do with more RAM. Perfect opportunity to try out a 4GB "droplet" :)
As a quick follow up in case anyone's interested (having just bought and spun up a 4GB instance), the raw vm performance is fantastic but the control panel functionality is fairly basic in comparison to Linode.
AFAICT, you can't:
- Choose different kernel images
- Resize or alter the disk and swap partitions
- Setup a private network interface
- Specify what action to take if the vm hangs (watchdog)
- Run IPv6
- See machine mem, cpu and bandwidth usage from within the web panel
- Setup IP white lists and security email alerts
- See the progress of queued jobs (e.g. taking a vm snapshot)
So, it's fast but pretty basic. For the price I think it's a great deal and I'm sure some (or all) of the missing features above will be added over time as the service matures.
Edit: I've just discovered you do get a progress bar when taking a snapshot but only if you access the snapshot feature from within the server panel (rather than doing it via the "Images" link on the main left hand menu). They also mention the vm gets powered off while the snapshot is taken but mine stayed up...
We offer a free 3 hour trial and if you register with a credit card or a PayPal payment you get an extra $1.25 credit which is the equivalent of running a 512MB virtual server for free for close to week so you can test things yourself in production.
Also true of regular harddrives, just the nature of the game when technically all of the harddrives are under the same load due to RAID and even with different manufacturing times the loads are the same so it's hard to estimate how far apart the batches should be in order to really minimize the incidence of such events.
We do provide snapshots and backups and always recommend that customers backup their servers and take care of ensuring that they have access to their important content in case of any failure.
But maybe we can do the impossible if we can do 100 pushups ;)
We've seen a high failure rate on SSD compared to SAS & SATA drives. All of our servers are in a RAID environment, so a single failure does not take the system offline. Additionally our backups and snapshots provide another level of redundancy against disk failure. So far no data loss.
That lines up with our lease structure for hardware which is 36mo.
It also lines up with the continuing improvements in server density which compensates for the increased costs in power usage and rack space so it just encourages good behavior in rotating out older hardware.
Although a bunch of people have been having issues judging by the comments, my experience just now was impressively easy and makes me want to benchmark/test it further.
Everyone has growing pains we are no exception, and today every little hiccup is public, but it's good because it makes the service overall more resilient so we welcome all feedback positive and negative because it ultimately leads to a better service for our customers.
Thanks! We definitely got a surge in traffic from the TechCrunch post and have been able to stabilize the frontend. Everything should be working normally at this time. We'll continue to add resources to make sure we can handle user requests going forward.
We use KVM and ECC RAM. And yes, you can install and run your own kernel. =]
Really?
I opened ticket 4740 and got the following response:
We currently do not offer a way to update or change the server kernel.
We often build up our features based on user requests. You can submit and
vote for features you would like to here:
http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean
Thanks,
Etel
We have a 45-90 second delay on our front-end firewall, we are also doing a few code deploys right now so it takes a little while to reset.
Our focus is always on ensuring that virtual servers that customers run are unaffected, but its great to get a nice traffic spike to the front-end to also see real world usage and how we should be updating things for the future.
Took a bit of a unexpected hit with the traffic. The SSD release is bringing new all time visitors to our website. We're spinning up thousands of servers as we speak. Here is a $20 coupon code from ServerBear to give us a shot - "SSDBEAR20"
We are back online. We are spinning up thousands of servers right now. Would love for you to give us a shot. Here is a $20 credit coupon - "SSDBEAR20" Let me know what you think.
Do we have to enter a credit card to use this code? I'd love to give it a longer trial, but don't want to store my credit card while I'm trying it out.
Answered my own question. When I tried to enter the code without giving a credit card, the billing form was rejected for not having cc info. But a few minutes later I got an email saying I have the $20 on my account.
Thanks! I will enjoy trying out the service, and I will sign a couple students up this afternoon.
We should have spun up some more web servers to handle the load, as an IaaS provider most of the time you are serving little front-end traffic, but lesson learned. :)
