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DigitalOcean safe for long term?
Service and prices are amazing.
512M + 20GB SSD for 5 USD/mo.
It all seems a bit too good to be true.
Company I'm working for is going to be purchasing a bunch of VPS servers, and we'd like to keep them for 2-3 years. Would DigitalOcean be a safe bet? Any chance of deadpooling?
I know this is hard to answer to, I'm just looking for general impressions.
Thanks for your input!
Comments
I suspect they would be bought out if anything, not just go away. Its pretty clear they are learning as they go.
Don't think they're gonna deadpool. They are a great company that provides a top-notch service to the table, with all sorts of new features added often to make their offerings even more intriguing!
Now, that said, it seems to be a creation of the same CEO as:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1790844/web-host-absolves-employee-hacking-blame
However, I'm sure they are taking new precautions to ensure this does not happen again. There is a DigitalOcean rep on here but I forget his username...
Another link discussing the same thing:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=990410
Thanks!
Also huge thanks to everyone who replied so far!
I did some benchmarking and the only letdown was UnixBench, which came in at ~800 points. Maybe I am a bit spoiled with Hetzner, that provides ~1700 points for every single core. But perhaps 800-1000 is some sort of standard for 1 arbitrary cpu?
Lower clockspeed per core mean lower score.
The CPU at DO is very weak.
CloudShards, Prometeus, RamNode are better in every aspect.
Except CloudShards and Prometeus are not SSD, at least not plans in those price ranges. Also some of these providers dont have EU datacenters, which is a dealbreaker for me.
CPU aside, DO is pretty damn sweet. Especially since they provide unlimited free backups and snapshots.
they're not free anymore afaik.
@littleguy
Backups are not free anymore with DO.
Say what ? Most of our plans in stock are ssd now. Even the non-ssd are also provisioned on SSD nodes since there is little space and stock on SAS2, last ones we used in the overzold offer and only minimum spares are kept now.
Due to shortage and price of drives we are preparing a SAN move to replace current SAS2 offer. Tests already began.
As for prices... The 40% discount for SSD makes every plan cheaper than DO I think. We do provide 10 GB ftp backup space all for free and 20 GB offsite for Biz plans, also free.
Sure, no snapshots and no automatic backups because the customer is in full control and nobody can know better what to save and when.
If you run remote backups for your VPS/es yes they are safe why not.
They are safe.. yes.
I've had good uptime and good I/O.
I don't see the problem.
E5s I guess... u_u
Well finally they are charging more, Which is a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing means they can finally be trusted as a viable business. So for the long term that is good. The bad thing is that it leave a bad taste in my mouth.
But I would rather they do this sooner rather then later, next step in my mind is properly limiting Port Speed.
I hope they make enough money then to improve on their network. Which currently sucks.
There is a risk of "deadpooling" with any startup, especially ones that operate in highly competitive glutted markets like VPS/Cloud hosting. They are venture capital funded so...
http://www.nvca.org/index.php?Itemid=147
My main complaint about Digital Ocean is their choice of a company name that was made famous by another unrelated much larger company called Digital Ocean in the 1990's.. The 1990's DO was the co-developer of the IEEE 802.11 wireless standard. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Ocean). When I hear the name Digital Ocean I still think Starfish not VPS. Yes, I'm old :P
Compared to other cloud providers they are severely lacking in features (and innovation), and their recent networking problems/hardware problems make them a bad choice if you're looking for a high availability solution to host your mission critical infrastructure. Digital Ocean is an excellent choice however if you're looking for a cheap, reliable alternative to some of the bedroom based low end hosts that use the Murphy or "OVH/[insert budget DC name] sucks, it was their fault not mine" excuse to cover up their ineptitude. .
Free until June 1st, and the pricing is very cheap (0.02 USD/GB).
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog_posts/snapshot-and-backup-roadmap
I wonder if the snapshots will be compressed, or at least you will be billed by the allocated space, like at Amazon, otherwise this won't be enough cheap if you want to mantain several snapshots per server.
I think you might be confusing snapshots with backups.
Snapshots are used to quickly deploy a preset configuration. Thus, they usually take <1GB.
Backups (which are a separate feature DO has) will cost 20% of the server cost. So a 512MB server with backups would be 5 USD + 1 USB (backup) = 6 USD monthly.
Still looking pretty good!
@littleguy: To answer your OP - DigitalOcean is certainly here to stay. We've been on the market for over a year and we're continuing to grow. Every product that we sell brings a bit more revenue and profit ensuring that as we scale up we are not putting ourselves out of business.
Our team is comprised of serial entrepreneurs who've run successful businesses in the past, we have a great team of advisors and the market reaction has been fantastic. As our cloud matures we'll be able to leverage our existing vendor relationships to drive better pricing and build more capacity for our users.
@ksec: As I mentioned in some of our other posts, the network itself functions perfectly with 1Gbps connections to the real servers, and 10Gbps BGP links to the net. The issue is in the virtualization driver that delivers the network to the VM. If your account is verified in our support system you can enable VirtIO network drivers and ensure that you're using an optimized network stack to power your VM. As we grow over the next few months we'll make VirtIO the standard networking option ensuring all users have a fantastic network experience.
We currently do not limit the machines, nor do we have any plans to. Originally our bandwidth was free and unmetered, our early adopter users were grandfathered into free bandwidth plans. For new users we bundle 1TB for just $5/month and add another TB for every plan thereafter. Additional transfer is only $0.02/GB one of the cheapest rates in the market - so it is in our interest that legitimate users have all the bandwidth that they need.
I am aware, but personally I don't know how they are stored. If you say it's 1GB, then is cool.
On second thought .. sighs, nm. Don't feel quite right about this post . Argggh !!!
I just meant a snapshot shouldn't be your full system including all your stored file.
It should be a newly installed machine that is configured the way you want for a purpose (for example web server). So that you can launch new machines without configuring everything each time.
Without data most Linux dists are about 500-1000 MB.
Throttled single virtual core. Weak.
# cat /proc/cpuinfoprocessor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 2
model name : QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 1999.999
cache size : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 4
wp : yes
flags : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm up pni vmx cx16 popcnt hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips : 3999.99
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
Could be one of those Xeon-E5 CPUs @2GHz?
edit: like this one: http://ark.intel.com/products/64594/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2620-15M-Cache-2_00-GHz-7_20-GTs-Intel-QPI
I feel almost sure of that
2-3 year lead boots with a provider. Good luck.
If DO does alright they'll be bought, merge or some other things like buying other oddball companies. All of which tend to often mean changes for existing customers and expectations.
You have to be ready to move and fluid with these sorts of services. Anything can and will happen whenever Murphy shows up drunken and belligerent.
No matter how drunk, he always manages to find that weak spot and aim at it
This business is brutal and making predictions for next 3 years is rather ... lets say inappropriate. But whatever happens it wont happen in a day with them for sure. Even better deals will come and i bet you will be changing vendors next year anyway
Murphy is drinking the Serbian vino I think
@DomainBop, you had to bring Pets.com dot bomb to the table.
Yep, here today, gone overnight.
Yeah, your backups are safe, until the very moment they will need to pull them out of Amazon Glacier and get hit with a six-digit bill for doing so
Only after having waited several hours for the backups to get ready.