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by thirdsight 4545 days ago
From my perspective for DO which I host email, web and my SVN on. I'd be happy to roll out production apps on it as well (in fact I'm doing that today).

* No verification required for me. Perhaps this is a step when paying by paypal? I've been asked many times for more info when using that. If they pulled this on me, my backup MX will handle email until I get to sort it.

* AMS1 was unfortunate. I signed up when it wasn't available and I'm in Europe. I moved my machine to AMS2 when that came up (after their first day of scary high load). I had my host in NYC2 to start with and it was perfectly usable from London, UK over SSH. I couldn't tell the difference between it and my server in the house.

* Custom kernels. This is one of two gripes for me. I really want FreeBSD but failing that I want the latest Debian kernel. Keeping an eye on this one. I've got ufw/iptables up front which I have my fingers crossed will protect from any network level issues, logwatch, fail2ban etc to monitor casual attempts and patches are tracked.

* SSH key generation: I always regen my SSH keys anyway if I didn't see it happen so this would have been a non issue for me. This is crypto paranoia on my part (and well justified).

* Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?

To be fair, for $5/month it's not bad. Having played with shared hosting for 17 years, managed massive colo custom deployments and paid through the nose for other hosting, it's the best compromise so far.

I looked at Linode but the bottom end was slightly too expensive and I'd rather have SSDs behind it as IO contention on VPSs is usually rather high so that got ruled out.

I tried an Amazon EC2 micro instance and it was horribly slow so they didn't get my cash.

5 comments

Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?

And it's actually ticked by default in the GUI, just not in the API (which is dumb, yes).

Cant say I actually use the API myself but its the job of the consumer of the API to read and understand it properly and test as well :)
and one could also say that it's the job of the producer of the API to set safe and secure defaults for an API :)
Or provide no defaults therefore solving both problems.
it was changed postmortem
Are you sure? The original complaint was solely about the API. I'd either want a source or someone that saw it themselves.
How can a server in NYC be as responsive from London as one in your house? Laws of physics still apply...
They're close enough in round trip time for it to be indistinguishable for me on SSH. That is all.
Maybe SSH on DigitalOcean is just really slow then. I moved my Linode from New Jersey to the maligned Fremont DC because the difference in ping was noticeable after I moved across the country. A Linode SSH session on a decent network is so snappy it feels like the box is on your home network (fast Vim editing and irssi sessions are possible because of the low latency).
Oh, SSH. I thought you meant ping (my home server has a latency of 0.3 ms, which is hard to beat even in the same city).
"Wiping data: when I saw the "securely destroy my data" checkbox I ticked it. Why would you not tick it?"

Others have noted that it is ticked (I don't know).

But I will say that as a marketing move it's a good idea. Because you are actively informing users of something that they might not have thought about or that competitors don't mention or mention in a way that is ignored.

Amazon does a version of this with shipping. They allow you to select slower shipping for the same price as the default fast prime shipping.

This was done after the security hole was revealed.

IMHO, it should not even be an option, it should be default, always.

I'm running a custom installation of FreeBSD on CloudSigma ("custom" meaning custom ISO, custom installer, custom packages, etc.). CPU, disk and memory are configured separately, so no weird "profiles" to choose from. IIRC ElasticHosts allows the same.
Quick check suggests £3.75 vs £57.29 a month there. I'd pay up to £12/month for FreeBSD as a privilege.
You might enjoy looking at Bigv (http://bigv.io/) from the well-known UK company, Bytemark.

They offer a cloudy-type self-managed virtual machine platform which is close to your £12 budget.

I moved off bigv to digital ocean. Management and billing are far better on DO.
yeah unfortunately that 21 euros vs 5 bucks was the game killer for me.
I paid with paypal, all they asked for was my cell phone number and what the site was about etc.

probably some bad apples were using it to host botnets or using credit card fraud