[nnq]

...then why not just use AWS's Lightsail instead of DO so you can use AWS RDS without worrying about latency? (Or the equivalent for Azure or GCP.)

Really asking, bc for next personal projects I was getting ready to abandon DO and use AWS Lightsail + RDS.

[tracker1]

Because spending $25-50/month on side projects that may sit for a while before I pick it up again is one thing. Spending hundreds a month is another. DO is significantly faster at any price point than what you get from lightsail or aws-ec2. Beyond that, I'd be more inclined to use Azure's data services simply because I like the interfaces better and far less hassle to get started with. I'd probably use SQL minimally and lean on AWS Tables quite a bit.

For a DO only solution, I'd probably use SQL more and then rely on their blob (s3 compatible) storage for some bits. I have a few small projects that I've been getting anxious to finally work on, and don't want to spend a bunch of money on them in the interim.

In case of modest growth, I also don't want to be hamstrung doing DB operations work for something that isn't actually making me money... I'll split things up to save a bit in the nearer term so long as I can have a migration path.

If I did split with data in azure/aws and the apps in DO, I might go all azure later, or I might go all DO and take on the DB operations side... it depends on if/how things grow.

[virmundi]

DO is cheaper for the servers. AWS is nice, but expensive. If you have the money, use it. If you are bootstrapping or willing to take on challenges yourself, DO like environments will save you a lot.

[nnq]

...yeah, but if best value for money would be the absolute goal, DO itself is quite expensive compared to Hetzner or Linode last time I compared. Others like OVH or Scaleway could be even cheaper.

[StudentStuff]

DigitalOcean and Linode are currently the same price, what $5 buys you on DO gets you the same specs on Linode.

Hetzner is not a reasonable choice for servers IMO, its akin to hosting in a datahole in Dallas, expect mixed bandwidth quality and questionable policies when issues arise. Comparatively, OVH looks stable.

Scaleway doesn't take abuse reports seriously FYI, these attacks are still primarily coming from IPs announced by their ASN, over a year after this article was written: https://badpackets.net/ongoing-large-scale-sip-attack-campai...

[pdimitar]

> Hetzner is not a reasonable choice for servers IMO, its akin to hosting in a datahole in Dallas, expect mixed bandwidth quality and questionable policies when issues arise.

Really surprised to hear that, can you please elaborate? I only heard good things about them up until now...

> Comparatively, OVH looks stable.

What kind of stable do you mean? Bandwidth, latency, average I/O ops, CPU load?

[StudentStuff]

Hetzner has had peering and jitter issues for years, in the past they would nullroute your server's IP for minor DOSes: https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6fwphr/hetzner_i...

Hetzner does pay lip service to improving their network, but its akin to ColoCrossing, the internal network infrastructure is not amazing due to budget constraints, and the peering situation isn't apt to improve as its essentially money and politics that created it.

> What kind of stable do you mean (referring to OVH)? Bandwidth, latency, average I/O ops, CPU load?

I am referring to bandwidth, latency & jitter when comparing OVH to others. One thing OVH has nailed is keeping jitter minimal, and there has been significant optimizations for routes in their newer datacenters as time has gone on.

Mature OVH locations already have fairly good peering, to the point that many time sensitive workloads that can't be fronted/cached choose OVH in certain regions.

Its really sad to see Google Cloud and AWS flunking on this front, the lack of internal IPv6 support to the VM kills mobile performance, adding tens of milliseconds of latency and incurring a stateful connection in cellular carriers CGNAT (which gets killed after ~100 seconds), reducing performance and breaking long term open connections. Sending a packet over IPv6 to a cellphone is often faster than using push messaging on iOS or Android.

OVH Latency Optimizations: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2873074#Commen...

[pdimitar]

Quite interesting and informative.

Thanks a lot! Changed my perspective.

[adventured]

That heavily depends on where you're operating from. Ignoring the latency problems of using Hetzner et al. for a moment (if you're based on the US). Increasingly as the Internet fractures down lines of very distinctly separate legal structures nation to nation (or region to region), Hetzner, OVH and Scaleway are not going to be viable choices for most organizations in the US. Particularly as it pertains to production environments and until or unless they get proper US facilities.

If I physically operate in the US and I base my servers in the EU, then I open myself up to not only US but also EU jurisdiction and compliance in a myriad of ways. It's an entirely unnecesary additional burden in exchange for a discount on infrastructure (which is rarely the biggest cost in anything these days).

I have no intention of ever complying with GDPR for example, unless I'm running a very large organization. Not because I disagree with most of GDPR, rather, because I'm going to comply with US laws, as that's my legal jurisdiction and those are the laws I'm governed by.

Hosting with Scaleway, OVH or Hetzner is a big jurisdiction mistake in most cases for smaller US organizations, just as it would be to arbitrarily host in Japan or China or Brazil (ie foreign locales with entirely different laws).

[nnq]

...being physically in the EU, but building stuff that has the potential to have 80% of the customers in US, as long as traffic to end-users in US is good (it usually is unless you care about low latency for gaming, or real-time-video bandwith for video chat), I'd be in the opposite camp and see no reason to pick US-only hosts (DO has Amsterdam datacenters though, and AWS or Azure also have).

For everyone EXCEPT the US-based businesses, being multi-juristiction by default form the get-go is the default, you know. And for any small or freshly created projects GDPR compliance is pretty easy though. EU's new copyright laws though... those are an abomination, hope it changes before they start being enforced. Nowadays EU and US are probably equally horrible and competing at being the most horrible with respect to restricting internet freedoms.

What I'm actually looking for is hosting services that are outside of BOTH US and EU for some more side project ideas that risk falling on the wrong side of IP laws (US's DMCA and all are horrible too btw...). Something that would be both run by a non-US and non-EU company and with datacenters physically outside this space. Something in Middle-East, SE-Asia or Russia could have decent bandwith tot he rest of the civilized world and at the same time be blessed with the capability to delay/ignore/missfile etc. requests from US and EU authorities, giving you a time buffer to damage control if s really hits the fan, while serving end users in those regions. Maybe after Brexit even the UK could become a nice place with more freedom too.

[anthony_barker]

OVH has a montreal datacentre... 9.46ms in additional latency from nyc

[Ayesh]

I wrote a review (https://ayesh.me/amazon-lightsail-review) of Lightsail when it came out. Although the specs are ok in paper, their Network is slow. I still would like to switch to Lightsail because I already use Route53 and CloudFront, but I wouldn't go with them for their Network speeds.

[JonoBB]

The performance on Lightsail is bad compared to DO - CPU, network, disk access are all much slower at similar price levels.