[vundercind]

Keep an eye on reachability and performance. I’ve seen DO consistently perform terribly and/or drop connections for months (that is, didn’t look like some brief routing glitch somewhere) for some US and Canadian routes (not, like, Sri Lanka or something) on excellent Internet connections. The fix was moving to AWS, problem gone. It felt like a shitty-peering-agreements issue.

[nostrebored]

People will pretend that this quality difference doesn’t exist in networking, uptime, server quality.

It’s not a drop in replacement. It might be worth it depending on what you’re doing.

[vundercind]

Frustratingly, it’s also something that doesn’t meaningfully appear on any features list or comparison sheet.

[data_marsupial]

How do you monitor the connection quality?

[vundercind]

From the client side. You can’t know what it should be like without knowing the client.

I’m sure there are lots of DO clients seeing the same things we did, but not realizing it.

We did see it (multiple DCs—we didn’t just not try to fix this before going to AWS) in multiple cases with tens of clients so if there’s good news it’s that if you can monitor like 100 clients distributed over a wide area and all of them behave as expected you may not be experiencing what we did. What we saw was closer to 5% with absurd slowness or frequently-dropped connections than to 0.01%.

And if you are just operating a website and sticking Cloudflare or whatever in front of DO anyway, this doesn’t matter. I expect that’s why it’s not a more widely-reported issue.