At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooked by many customers.
That difference is huge if you're doing high-bandwidth work and you run a ton of droplets.
DO seems to be for devs farting around and kids putting up wordpress sites. Its not really competing with shops like Linode or Rackspace. That may change, but everything about DO screams, "Do not use me for production."
Meanwhile, my 7 or so production VMs on Linode are going strong and now have been migrated to their new SSD-based platform.
I was very happy with Linode, but they dragged their feet for years on it. My workload was I/O-bound and I got far more bang for my buck from DigitalOcean, so I jumped.
Linode should have taken them seriously.
Having said all of that, Linode are still going very strong and remain the much better option for production stuff. I have 3 machines with DO (two $5 ones and a $40 one) and about 15 with Linode (of varying sizes) and in my opinion Linode is head and shoulders above DO in terms of features, capability, professionalism and reliability. They just need to improve their marketing.
As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome.
Thanks
But I think the general consensus amongst a lot of people is that DO are better suited to devs wanting to play around and Linode are better for when you want something more than that or want to push something to prod.
edit: now that I think of it, DO developed a reputation for terminating VMs with no notice if you violate their terms or do other things. I personally had my VMs terminated because I signed up for 2 accounts with the same IP. Imagine if I was hosting production content on there....
DO is great at what it does (I have 3 vms with them) but when you need more, Linode wins.
If you need a few small VPSs to play around and test things out, and are fine with the (very) occasional performance / bandwidth degradation, I don't see how Linode offers you a "much better service", at least in terms of cost.
I have a Linode VPS for production, but find myself often spinning up and tearing down DO VPSs for experimentation.
DO is cheaper but it's not quite the same level of product.
If you google for some standard server maintenance problem (e.g. migrating from Apache to nginx), it's usually DO which is ranked first. Their posts are relatively high quality, and there are a lot of them, enough to cover many common problems. For example: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migr...
It doesn't show annoying pop ups, anything like that, but after visiting those pages many times you might decide to give DO a go. Well, that's what I did.
Also, some people say that similar cheap VPS providers exist for a long time and what DO did was put a nice simple UI. That proves that to create a successful product, you don't need some new complicated features that your competitors do not offer. Making interactions with the system easier, improving user onboarding process by reducing friction can go a long way.
For me, the articles show
1) They're competent. If they're experts at solving all these random problems in managing a Linux server, they probably also know how to run a reliable, high-performant VPS.
2) They care about their customers. They're going the extra mile to help customers (and potential customers) solve their actual day-to-day problems. This is a good sign.
Haven't yet had an actual problem that required me to contact their support (which hints at #1), but it's the impression I (and probably many others) got from the articles.
I'm just glad they actually took that idea from them and anybody that provide any services should have these tutorials... It makes it much more approachable for people with little system admin skills.
DO has a dedicate team just providing incredible tutorials that are somewhat related but not completely related to DO itself.
Since the physical node have problem, I plan to take snapshot then spin up a new node using the image. However, as the physical node have problem, the snapshot take more than 7 hours and still failed to snapshot (No way to cancel snapshot task).
DO support told me the snapshot is running, but I seriously think their support not honest about it and I ask they provide proof to show the snapshot is moving, they failed to do so. (From UI I can see JSON response show progress stuck at 3%, they lied)
Yesterday, DO reboot again my node.
Just my two cent, never ever use DO for serious production usage.
Plan for your server to go down at any time, and, if you have actual $$$ in play, also plan for the zone to go down.
Amazon encourages this thinking by having very low-latency links between AZ (Availability Zones) - and they also recommend deploying in two geographical regions should a regional disaster occur.
I love DO, but sometimes the reboots without warning can be annoying.
Strong passwords and always use a private key when SSHing.
I'm guessing that VPS providers have a low support cost/customer compared to shared hosting. No hairy compatibility issues, everything is neatly abstracted away, everyone has their own, independent environment with most of the administrative tasks offloaded onto the user.
After you toss in a few guides that double as marketing, and are usually written by the users themselves, all that's left is to take care of the hardware and bill.
[1] https://www.runabove.com/index.xml#compute
[2] https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/524334437039747073
Hopefully the 1GB plan will be available soon. That tweet is from October but it doesn't appear to be available yet.
I run a fair amount of dev servers, and that price ($2.50) is mind blowing. But i fear that it's far too cheap to be anything but a letdown.. Thoughts?
They're hardly the only VPS provider offering that price point. (Although it's true, many of the others have a slightly fly-by-night look about them. But by no means all of them.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8521311
http://thenewstack.io/mesosphere-now-supported-on-digital-oc...
