[chrislomax]

I see quite a few hosting on DO, how does that suit you for a production environment?

I've heard the structure is becoming more stable now?

I have a VPS with them but it's purely for a USA VPN to watch Netflix through so it doesn't always need to be up

EDIT: Typo

[sunsu]

I have 13 production instances on DO and have been very pleased. Some of them are heavy on the CPU. I did quite a bit of testing comparing equivalent DO 8&16GB instances to Linode and DO came out ahead each time. That may have changed now that Linode released all their upgrades.

[chrislomax]

I'm interested as I have a customer who pays around £200 a month per dedicated box at the minute for nearly half the spec. They are true dedicated boxes though and the network they are on hardly ever goes down (roughly 20 minutes downtime in 3 months due to an edge router firmware upgrade gone badly wrong).

The provider is transparent though and the issue hasn't happened previously or since.

The 16GB RAM package at £100 a month is just amazing if it really is that stable.

Do you do any type of redundancy between DCs / networks? How did you find their redundancy tools if you did?

[alelefant]

I wouldn't call 3 months with 20 minutes of downtime a great track record. I'm not saying that the company isn't worthwhile, but more time might be deserved before calling it stable.

[chrislomax]

Sorry I didn't make it clear at all!

We had 3 months where we had 20 minutes of downtime. The edge router was ~15 minutes and there was a denial of service on a machine in the same portion of the network which took a few minutes to isolate.

That is the only downtime we received in our 12 month initial contract which started Feb 2013 and ended Feb 2014 (we are on a rolling contract now).

So (20 / 12) = 1.6 minutes a month averaged. For arguments sake it puts us around the four 9s in availability a month.

[alexcroox]

Same, I have one for a VPN and another one for a simple nodejs app. $5 a month for nodejs hosting with a static IP. The nodejs as a service sites either don't offer external static IPs, or charge a fortune for it. It's been fantastic.

[chrislomax]

How do you find node performs on those $5 boxes?

What's your traffic like on it?

I've not used node before but it is a language / tech that interests me

[solomone]

I'm running a DO box with node, mongo, and nginx. I'm able to get ~ 500rps

[thematt]

Why not just purchase a VPN subscription instead? Why bother maintaining a whole server?

[chrislomax]

I did it for two reasons really; I wanted to test out DO as a service to see what it had to offer (at $5 a month at my own expense it's written off easy) and I like to learn new things.

I'd done a similar thing on AWS before on their free platform but you only got 100GB a month transfer. This is eaten up quickly on streaming videos.

I'm mainly a .net dev on Windows boxes but I would like to expand my knowledge a little further nginx etc. Most of the open source technologies run best on Linux so I like to dabble in the prompts a little for experience.

I setup an old computer in my home recently and installed Ubuntu as a home media server. The setup ended up costing me £8 in a new RAM stick and about a week of messing to get it working how I wanted. I could have purchased a NAS with it all installed for £200 but I just enjoy the challenge. It's a welcome break from programming sometimes, it's a kind of downtime.

Also, VPN packages start at $9.99 a month if you pay month to month (the savings are the longer term contracts) so the way I see it I am halving that cost and learning at the same time.