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by opendais 4373 days ago
Tbh, given DO's price point, I think EBS would be more support headache than its worth.

Cloudfront & S3 [or equiv] you can already get elsewhere and it doesn't really impact the setup.

DO really, really badly needs highly available, multi-datacenter load balancers. Without highly available load balancing [even in-DC would be good enough] where you can failover the IPs from Load Balancer A to B...

I just don't see it moving outside of the hobby/staging/etc space. Projects that you can afford downtime on.

2 comments

If you can survive a few minutes downtime, then you can use Amazon Route53 failover DNS (with health checks) combined with low TTLs to provide failover between DigitalOcean data centres for ~$0.50/month - this is how we structure our less critical APIs that are hosted there.

I agree though - it'd be great if DO provided a proper load balancing solution.

Mhm, I can do DNS load balancing now with any provider.

DO's main competition atm with price parity is Linode which provides single-dc HA load balancers. If I want to pay more I can use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc that also offer them. ;)

I'd really like to avoid DNS load balancing to failover within a datacenter at a minimum [in the event of a load balancer failure], ideally I'd like to avoid it completely.

I have a handful of sites that are more than just hobby sites, but the number of 9's in the SLA won't affect the bottom line at all. 5 DO droplets = $25 / month makes significantly more sense in this case than paying over $150 for the equivalent at AWS.

And I think this use is a large enough market for DO to make a fortune.

Sure, but I'm willing to bet that if DO offered failover, you'd be willing to pay them more to take advantage of it. Perhaps not a lot more, but it's money they're leaving on the table.

I do think that offering IP failover would be a much better way for DO to pick up extra revenue in the future than offering a competitor to S3 or EBS or Cloudfront or whatever.

Fair enough.

I've never worked on that sort of thing so to me downtime == $$ lost. I need a load balancer for anything more than a hobby project as a result. The one thing I can't find anywhere is truly multi-DC load balancers as a service from a hosting provider I'd use.