[dwwoelfel]

I ran https://precursorapp.com on Vultr in the early days. I had a setup with a few dedicated servers for the DB and load balancer, and then I would spin up and shut down application servers whenever I deployed new backend code. Infrastructure looked like: https://precursor.precursorapp.com/document/Backend-Infrastr...

I used to recommend it to everybody, but don't any longer. I had two negative experiences that made me stop recommending it.

The first is frequent restarts. Very small sample size, but both me and a friend started experiencing restarts every month or so. I don't think I got any advance warning about the restarts, but I'm not positive.

The second is that networking between instances stopped working for me in the middle of the night shortly after Vultr did an upgrade. Support wasn't able to help (though they did try) and I couldn't figure out anything on my end. I had to switch everything to AWS to get the site back online before people woke up in the morning.

I was super happy with it before those two problems, though, and the people there seemed competent and professional. I was also using FreeBSD, so it may not be as well supported as Linux (which may have contributed to the networking problem).

[superasn]

Thanks for this comment. I was about tell my team to investigate Vultr as an option for our next website, but I guess we'll first do some more research into this.

We're still on AWS too. Currently spending about $50 / site which adds up quite quickly when you have 20+ sites. Our current breakup is something like (2 x t2.micro - one for website, one for cron created using Elastic Beanstalk, 1 x db.t2.micro for RDS + Elastic load balancer cost). I'm sure we can bring it down to $10 / site if we were to move to Vultr or Scaleway but it's a very small site to pay for the reliability AWS has provided to us all these years (apart the recent S3 outage). So guess we'll too just stick to AWS for now until.

[jlgaddis]

Why not just get a couple of bigger instances and run all your sites on them?

[superasn]

There are many reasons but a few from the top of my head are:

1) The whole system is running on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk (via Docker). Beanstalk provisions 3 instances for every site (1 Web, 1 Worker/cron, and 1 RDS) for every app with ELB on front.

2) It makes installing updates easy and automatic using deployment scripts which we have on every site.

3) Everything (web/cron/database) is configured to scale up and down automatically, i.e. new servers start as per demand. This may not be possible otherwise.

[jrowley]

dev ops is hard!

[gravyboat]

I encountered the same problem with restarts you did, though I only had 4 in ~8 months. They gave no advanced warning and simply notified that my instance had been restarted which was extremely unprofessional to me.

[easytiger]

I went through a period of frequent restarts on vultr too. Moved to ssd nodes with their reddit offer to two locations.