[rprime]

100-150K here. DO has been very good for us, with some in house auto-scaling, the bill goes as low as $250, uptime has been in the %99.9.

2xLB + frontend servers (from 1 to N) + Postgres (master + multiple read slaves depending on frontned servers) + elasticsearch + redis + image servers.

Only thing that'd probably move us off DO is GCP adding Postgres to their Cloud SQL offering.

But overall, very happy.

[activatedgeek]

Wow, sounds good. Which DB would be cheaper - a managed one or a self-hosted one?

I have been planning to use DO as my personal test-bed (for anything and everything).

[rprime]

Cheaper, definitely self-hosted, but as with everything, you get what you pay for, you'll have to take care of fail-over and backups on your own.

Start with a small instance on DO, enable backups (for a small fee DO will create weekly backups of your instance), as your project grows, tune PgSQL and resize the instance up, add a slave, weekly backups of the instance might not be enough at this point, so also pg_dump the database at a more frequent time interval (1/day), send the backup to 1 or 2 offsite stores (S3/other remote server/etc).

Managed, comes with it's own problems as well, but at least you can blame someone else when it breaks :).