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7 month review of DigitalOcean
It’s now 7 months since I signup with DigitalOcean, and I have to say that I do not regret at all. Their service has been really great, their servers works perfect (I’m using their AMS1 and NY2 DC), their network has 99.989% uptime last 7 months, so everything is just perfect.
In my last review I mention that DO maybe would launch a UK datacenter, and now they have. They have also added a new DC in the Netherlands, AMS3. So two new data centers the last 4 months.
If you like to sign up, you can use my affiliate link here ( https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=6baa1cd0214b ). If you sign up with this link, you will get $10 in free credit so you can play around, and get two months of free hosting with their lowest plan.
Reed my complete review here.
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 AMS1 DC, paying $5/mo for it. So most of my review is based on this server, with the uptime. But I have done my benchmark test on a 64 GB droplet.
Service/Support
The first (and only) time I used their support so far, it was a mixed experience. I asked them some really short and clear questions, and got BS replies back. But I had stumbled on a little “trade” secret, that the normal support guy did not know (or wanted to reply on). I did not understand why I could not get any reply, after I had repeated my self for the third time. I then tweeted about this issue, and then it took under 10 minutes before I got a reply, both on twitter and on my support ticket. This time from a Support Specialist. I got a really good explanation on my question, and as a really nice thing I got a credit on my account.
I think this is a excellent proof of a good host. I could easily been a situation there I had been very unhappy, just getting strange replies on my ticket, but it was solved very fast. And with a very good outcome for me. 
Their response time on “normal” support tickets is around 14 minutes average from my tickets.
Benchmark
The first test is with a 16 GB 8vCore server, and I got a UnixBench result of 2844. I did then run a test on a 64 GB 20vCore server in their new London DC, and the result was: 4927 points. It currently holds the 3.place on my Top20 list.
I get an average of 445 MB/S on my DD test, and thats not so impressive since they offer pure SSD disks on the nodes. Still, 445 MB/s is not bad, but it’s not Ramnode speeds either. I have seen DO speeds up to over 700 MB/s but I’m sure that was on low load nodes.
Network/uptime
My monitoring services tells me that I have a 99.914% uptime the last 30 days with 1 minute monitors. I’m using their AMS1 location for my test server. They had some hardware issue with the node I’m on, thats the reason for the downtime this month.
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).
They expands, and thats a good thing. Their new London location and their new AMS3 location in the Netherlands is up an running.
If you like to sign up, you can use my affiliate link here ( https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=6baa1cd0214b ). If you sign up with this link, you will get $10 in free credit so you can play around, and get two months of free hosting with their lowest plan.
Comments
For non-enterprise grade SSDs, this is pretty good, actually. Keep in mind there's overhead when you do full virtualization, where with OpenVZ you get almost host-level I/O. 400 to 800 MB is pretty much the "Real" write speed when you have Raid0 or Raid10, and with some higher end SSDs you get up to 1GB.
At the end of the day, if you're happy with DO, that's all that matters here. Good for you, OP!
I'm really happy with DO, but still, I like iwStack.com better, and have all my live servers there.
Another really happy customer with DO, a good, decent company to host with.
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So for $160/Month for a 16GB 8vCore Server you get a similar UnixBench result as a $5/Month Vultr Server with 1 Core...
Shameful, but I like it. :P
Makes me want to grab a 5$ vultr vps and run unixbench 24/7, I guess that's ok?
@DaveA - yes. DO has not the best score in Unixbench, you are the Unixbench master
You are #1 on my Top20 list, and you took the place from Soladrive.com that had held it for a couple of years.
And thats before I have got tested your 24 core multi-core series server. It's never available.
ditigalocean is mostly fine. but i have had some problems when i tried to create, destroy a droplet or take a snapshot.
once it took forever to destroy a droplet and the reply from my ticket is just telling me to wait; I guess the support person did not do any investigation before replying to me.
then after my repeated requests, someone finally looked at it and found the process was hang. so he/she had to manually terminate it for me
sometimes it is just so slow. for a 20G SSD snapshot. it has been over 40 minutes now. it is still PROCESSING my EVENT. and my ticket is unanswered.
i don't know what software they use to create a snapshot. but it does not take long to create an image of about 10G including zip and write to a file.
vultr's beta version of snapshot takes a few minutes (less than 10). and it does not require me to poweroff my vps.
i am not saying that vultr is better. digitalocean probably has its advantages. i am using both at the moment. but this is quite annoying. i hope someone at digitalocean can do a better job.
I am pretty sure the backups/snapshot go to something like Amazon Glacier so its probably so slow due to that.
I doubt that very much, glacier is pretty expensive, even if you do not consider the retrieval cost. Maybe something home baked, but I also doubt they use tapes.
That happens after the snapshot has completed.
Some cheap shots from Vultr in this thread.
Yup, my mistake, it's in house but they also transfer them out to Glacier as a secondary backup.
Yup. It's irritating though how a VM has to be offline during the snapshot process, though they appear to be doing away with this in some locations.
Don't really know much about snapshots but I would have thought it was offline to ensure there are no files being accessed/changed or does a snapshot work around that issue?
Vultr/Linode manage to run snapshots without the VM being offline. DO are managing it now in AMS3 but not in existing locations.