[hexhex]

We have such an application running on DO, 100k visitors users a month. We have a big application server running and other servers for DB (postgres and redis) and static files (which is basically a nginx mirror).

So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess.

Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this.

TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though

[activatedgeek]

I think the DO Load Balancers won't help with your DB operational concern. You'll have to use some other in-house or outsourced solution.

If you switch to AWS, will you be maintaining a cross-datacenter VPN connection or something?

[hexhex]

Yeah the load balancer was just intended for the application servers. Running a hot DB secondary with just read accesses is possible by setting up manually, but tends to require a lot of maintenance work during updates in our experience.

To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?

[activatedgeek]

Having a cross-datacenter VPN is one way. But I am not sure about how bad your latencies will end up. Most likely they won't be performant especially in the case of an ACID compliant DB.

[bowersbros]

We outsourced our database to Google Cloud after having pains with percona on DO with clustering. Might be worth looking at that. No regrets for us so far, except that restoring backups is painful if you want 1 out of many databases restored.