[singingcheese]

Rebooting an EC2 instance never causes you to lose your data (no matter what type of storage you pick).

EC2 has two types of storage: local disk "ephemeral/instance storage" and network storage "EBS". Digital Ocean only provides local disk. In EC2 you can mix and match, but EBS is the most convenient.

If you do a stop and start on EC2 (very different to picking "reboot"). You will lose what's on local disk because stop/start is basically requested that you be moved to a different physical box. Data stored on EBS is not affected. On Digital Ocean if you "power off" you remain on the same host, but get billed at full rate whereas on EC2 you don't get billed for the time it's stopped. Rebooting on EC2 is the same as rebooting on DO.

If you use EBS for storing everything your data survives even if the hardware your instance is running on breaks. If the hardware breaks on Digital Ocean or on EC2 if you only use ephemeral (local) storage you lose your data. It's the same story on DO as it is on EC2. The only difference is that EC2 gives you the option of storage which can survive the physical box you are on dying (EBS).

[porker]

> If the hardware breaks on Digital Ocean or on EC2 if you only use ephemeral (local) storage you lose your data.

Is that really the case - neither are using a SAN or RAID or other backup method to ensure data is preserved in (almost) all circumstances? Not so bothered about EC2 (due to EBS) but for Digital Ocean..? Poor show if that's the case.