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3 month review of Digital Ocean (updated)
(this is a edited version of my 30 day review - it's now a 3 month review)
When I first started looking at Cloud hosting, I did quickly hear about two services, iwStack.com and DigitalOcean. Three months ago I did signup for an account with DO, and have used their Amsterdam 2 DC since that. As always I started with a small VPS plan, to test uptime, network, hardware etc. Here is my review of DigitalOcean.
Product/hardware/price
DigitalOcean is not really a cloud host, but they offer cloud features like pay by the hour, snapshots, templates, quick deployment, use your credit to create lots of servers, backups, several locations etc. But still, you get a “normal” KVM server. They have no High Availability, no Fail-Over, no Own ISO, no External Firewall with GUI etc like iwStack do.
But still, they have a really good product. It’s super simple to create new droplets, it takes only around 55 seconds before it is online (you get the root password on e-mail). In fact, it only takes around 55 seconds to create a 64 GB RAM, 640 GB SSD disk, 20vCore KVM server! What other host let you do that?
Their prices starts at $5/mo or $0.007/hour. You pay for what you use, and they do only bill by the hour. But they do charge you 100% regardless of your servers is turned on or off. Still, you can create a template, and delete your server, then recreate it later on when you need it, without paying for it. Unlike iwStack.com, they do not charge for template disk space.
I’m normally using a 512 MB RAM , 20 GB disk. 1 TB BW, 1vCore server on their AMS2 DC, paying $5/mo for it. So most of my review is based on this server, with the uptime.
Service/Support
I have now used their support some times, and I have to say that DO have a great support team. Their response time on “normal” support tickets is around 14 minutes average from my tickets.
I have not had any big technical issue, so I can't say anything about how helpfull they are about issues like that.
Their service is great, they are very active on Twitter, and they really take customers serious.
I have now started using their servers in productions. I have one VPS backup server and one VPN server with them.
Benchmark
I still get pretty good network speeds on my NL node. Around 50 MB/s from other NL nodes. The disk IO is around 200 MB/s this time.
Network/uptime
My monitoring services tells me that I have a 100% uptime the last 90 days with 1 minute monitors. I’m using their AMS2 and NY2 location for my servers.
Conclusion
DigitalOcean is not a complete cloud host, it lack some cloud features like HA, fail-over, firewall etc, but it still is a really good host. Servers is deployed within one minute, you can choose from several locations, templates etc. You can create templates and backups that you can transfer from EU to US and vica versa.
Their servers is really good, you can resize your servers with one click, and their uptime is really good. (the best).
Signup and do a test for your self, I’m sure you will like DO as much as I do.
If you want to help me out, use my aff link (it do not cost you anything, but DO will pay a small fee if you use more then $10)
Comments
I am not a fan of DO, but I think those features doesn't define a "cloud" host. Instead, the cloud thing means that you can vertically scale up and down anytime and add more instances in the same node without a manual provisioning. That's what I understand. Been using Rackspace and EC2 for quite a long time by now
Beside that, the load balancing via HA proxy is upto you. You need to setup your own infrastructure and you'll decide whether you balance the load with a software proxy like HA or a hardware load balancer. Fail over system depends on your load balancer as well as DNS system (again, totally depends on how you design your infrastructure) and these issues can not DEFINE the "cloud"-yness of any host
I think the way you've reviewed a cloud hosting provider is fundamentally flawed. You didn't even mention how the siblings were working in the same node, or how was their latency, what about the private IPs etc. And DO's imaging/snapshot system is really cool.
Again, not a fan of DO here.
Confirming Rackspace cloud VPS is awesome speed. DO is nothing to do with cloud features.
I hope to see this review after 6 months. For now you're on "a new node" as their support says.
DO is good, I have used them since early on in their life and notwithstanding a couple of early network issues all has been good. Snapshots, backups, several locations, I never check disk IO but it must be more than I need as my sites are always fast and perform perfectly well, network is far better than most I have used and there is never any drama.
It's no more cloud than most of the hosts bar a few that use the term but they provide a solid service for the money.
I have been with DO for around 6 months and have been quite happy. I am mostly using them for their NY location as I have not been able to find any other service in the area that performs as well anywhere near DO's price.
I am using them for a game server which has players from all over the world, but primarily USA and EU. So north east USA is the best location. The server for this game uses hardly any CPU and not much memory either so most of the time I am on the lowest plan. However I do bump up to more CPU power on Sundays since league games occur on Sunday and it is very easy and inexpensive to resize the server for like half a day each week.
Latency is very good and stable. It has not been perfect as there have been very brief spikes, like for 1 minute or less. But they have been very rare, maybe an average of once per month at most. I believe it is the CPU getting hit hard occasionally. As mentioned already I started bumping up the specs for league and there have been no spikes at all with 2 or more CPUs (though not really enough time used on 2+ CPUs yet to say it will never happen).
There has been no unexpected downtime. I don't believe there was any downtime so far during announced maintenance either (just greatly reduced server performance briefly, did not count the rare maintenance period when discussing server performance above).
I started using Vultr to compare and have had a server running for just under a week. Saw the server spike for the first time yesterday for a few minutes. Had been running great until then. Not sure what to make of the latency spike though as it seemed like a small numbers of players were not spiking. Normally if the server gets overloaded no one is excluded from the spiking. Thinking some router somewhere nearby was overloaded or something but not sure.
Still trying out Vultr, but have tried many other similarly priced providers in the area and the performance was no where close to as stable as DO.
Lag spikes for some and no lag for others means some carriers are having a briefly overloaded peering, nothing much you can do, or the DC has some loaded carrier, usually due to some attack. That is mostly unavoidable, read, nothing you can do about it, must live with it if it is rare enough. If it is often and affects a lot of players, then it might be a problem with the network at the DC, not having enough capacity or frequent attacks because they allow game servers or IRC or something like that coupled with torrenting without the bw and mitigation inn place for that.
I forgot to write about private IPs. I have actually done some testing on several servers, using internal IPs to communicate and transfer lots of data.
I did write about DO snapshot system in my conclusion.
But I will take this points back to my 6 month review I will write.