DigitalOcean Sucks. Use DigitalOcean

https://raymii.org/s/articles/Digital_Ocean_Sucks._Use_Digital_Ocean.html

by mdewinter • 13 years ago

208 186 13 years ago

mateuszf3• 13 years ago

Digital Ocean is great. The only thing keeping us from using it is lack of private networking in Amsterdam DC.

clone1018• 13 years ago

Their private networking is not private to you, it's private to all customers. Meaning I could access your server via your internal IP.

What advantage are you looking for?

zhemao2• 13 years ago

I'm guessing it has something to do with EU data privacy laws.

mateuszf3• 13 years ago

I'm looking for free, speedy network for my data to not go through Internet. Data should be encrypted anyway.

tlongren• 13 years ago

Recently moved a few sites to a single, 1GB droplet and am very, very happy with it. Also have been using a 512MB droplet for the last 3 months or so to run a tor relay. Their "one-click" installs are nice too, and WordPress runs really well on a 1GB droplet.

threeio• 13 years ago

Been a big fan since their first deploy... grandfathering is nice for unlimited bandwidth... Use them for most test setups now, proof of concepts, etc... heck I've even got a domain pointed at them, and I've run my own DNS servers since the early 90s ;)

neom12• 13 years ago

IPv6 is something we get asked about a lot, and it's on the way. Unfortunately it's not something we can just "turn on" - We have to make sure it's build out properly and also fits in with some of our other roadmap items that our community will love in the coming year.

So yeah, love the feedback and actively working every day to bring any suck to zero.

stanley• 13 years ago

I came across an article [1] that mentions load balancing as an upcoming feature. Is there a chance you could elaborate on the feature spec or provide a rough ETA?

[1] http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digital...

neom12• 13 years ago

Hey Stanley, see above. :)

IgorPartola7• 13 years ago

IPv6 is a must for my use case. Currently, I have to use an IPv6 tunnel which is OK, but definitely less than ideal.

Can you disclose what kind of allocation each instance or each customer will get? Hopefully, you guys will be much less stingy with them than Linode, and give each customer a /48 to allocate freely between the individual nodes.

I am a very happy customer currently and am looking to use DO for my next project which involves heavy use of your API and lots of concurrent instances. As a customer I can testify that your product is a fantastic value for the price. Keep up the good work!

neom12• 13 years ago

Totally get the ipv6 tunnel being a pain.

I think our allowances will have to be sorted out a little down the road but /48 is easy to acquire (unlike ipv4 where we have to wait till we're at 80% capacity before we're allocated more IPs). ipv6 gets a little sticky when you start talking about the internet of things, there are a lot of new concepts introduced that we have to take into account when we're managing what is closing in on a million of the worlds public hosts. I don't see ANY reason why we won't allow a least one /48 per droplet. Part of our slowness on things like CDN, load balancing, failover etc are because we want the system to be really well build out to accommodate both ipv6 and the future of internet protocol addressing. While I can't speak for other providers, for us it's something we take seriously, but need to test all our systems together to make sure cloud 2.0 if you will works really we..

As I'm sure you know, we've scaled massively in the last 8 months and unfortunately the "lets just pop in a feature" becomes a lot more complex as the complexity and stability needs of our customers increase.

What I can say with 100% confidence is that there is a group of really amazing engineers working on this stuff and it's all in a roadmap, we just have to make sure everything is simple, stable and safe before we roll out.

I hope you can appreciate your measure in this matter. :)

tedchs• 13 years ago

You mentioned Linode's IPv6 allocation, but they gave me a /48 routed to my small $20/mo server by filing a ticket, no questions asked.

umsm• 13 years ago

I have a stupid question: Why do people need IPv6? What do they use it for?

marquis• 13 years ago

Next generation P2P apps is one great addition. Though we've yet to see it in the wild, the theory is that you don't need to port forward any more (just make allowances in the Firewall). Will come with it's own set of security issues. Someone here probably knows a lot more about it that I do.

IgorPartola7• 13 years ago

To build the next generation of the Internet of course! :)

On a practical level, IPv6 is easier to administer since in a lot of ways it's more straightforward. For home use it's great since every device gets its own globally unique address (I can `ssh home.example.com` from any IPv6 enabled host).

Firewall rules become simpler if you have a common prefix vs lots of individual IPv4 addresses.

There are already lots of users who have IPv6 enabled: http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html: TL;DR: over 2% of Google's traffic is over IPv6. Running dual stack servers lets you reach more customers.

I guess to an extent asking what people use IPv6 for is similar to asking what people use IPv4 for. You don't normally use IP. You use applications that run on top of TCP/IP or UDP/IP. Having a public IP address makes writing and managing those applications easier.

Edit: Also IPv6 addresses are cheap. An additional IPv4 address will run you about $1/month with a lot of providers. A billion IPv6 addresses is one billionth of the minimum allocation you will get for free. So in the long run, the cheapest DO droplet might cost as little as $4 instead of $5 :).

Hello71• 13 years ago

So when will the bullshit about custom kernels be cut out?

matiasb• 13 years ago

A few weeks ago it was still possible to sniff traffic from other instances.

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/53

neom12• 13 years ago

We addressed this as soon as it was brought to our attention and is no longer a vulnerability. :)

sdesol• 13 years ago

It would be nice if implementing something like Amazon Marketplace was in their roadmap but it isn't right now.

neom12• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say it's not on our radar. ;)

luos• 13 years ago

I use smallest Digital Ocean package (Amsterdam) to run a play 2.x scala app. It is not a visited site (yet, heh) but I am very happy with it. And they gave me a coupon when I couldnt tinker with the project and cancelled, so I am back again :)

The sucks part fortunately havent affected me yet. I could use a little more ram but when I am there it could be changed with a click (and a reboot if I remember correctly).

batbomb• 13 years ago

I was trying recently trying to estimate write-ahead log performance for my 2GB droplet, and for random sized (2-8k, 4.3k avg) sequential writes, my droplet is able to throw out 230MB/sec or ~60k 4k writes/second. I haven't actually done database benchmarks yet, but it looks pretty promising.

Kalki• 13 years ago

I'd really like to see additional storage available for a node. I'd like to add an additional 100gb to my 20$ per month node.

aquadrop• 13 years ago

I second that. I understand SSD space is expensive, but sometimes you have 0.05 load average and full disk. At least it would be nice to get some kind of Amazon EBS analogue.

marveller• 13 years ago

Agree, I am also running out of disk space now, don't need additional RAM or CPU power.

mikeyen4• 13 years ago

Has anyone consider collocation yet? For DO 's 160GB 16G $160 packages, I figure I can easily put a 1u in colo center with a few TBs for $99 / month in Bay area.

Any pro/con with that approach?

fareesh• 13 years ago

I read somewhere on their forums that this is planned. I too, am eagerly anticipating this.

mikeyen4• 13 years ago

Me too!

karmicthreat3• 13 years ago

I like DigitalOcean and these problems are annoying. I'd really like to run coreos. DO claimed they were near deploying a custom image feature months ago. But it has never materialized.

The lack of IPv6 is a pain but I can deal with it. And the screw up with the NY2 network going down for a day kind of soured things as well.

What I'd really like is for DO to be a bit faster with feature development and more transparent on their progress.

neom12• 13 years ago

We're working on a few new ways to deploy custom stuff, we want it to be really fly and work really really well and be really really simple so we are refining it. I can't give a timeline for this but it's in our short term roadmap for sure.

karmicthreat3• 13 years ago

It doesn't need to be perfect. I can deal with a more complex but functional feature tomorrow far better than a perfect feature in a year.

fakeanon• 13 years ago

"TL;DR: DigitalOcean is a good VPS provider with minor issues. I like them and have been using them for over a year." -- Thus a dishonest title.

UntitledNo4• 13 years ago

I think the title of the original post is trying to be creative. The world would be a boring place if everything was stated as a matter of fact. You might not like the author's creativity, but I wouldn't call it dishonest.

larrys3• 13 years ago

It's a link bait title. Got me to read it. The word "minor" doesn't get me interested.

Other suggestions:

"Why John Kennedy would have loved Digital Ocean" "What Digital Ocean and the weather have in common".

Sorry I hate to joke and I don't want HN to end up just being people joking. But I had to point out that the title that gets attention is the title that gets your attention.

nwh3• 13 years ago

I've still had absolutely no issues with my running droplets, though space is getting very tight in AMS1 at times when creating new ones. Their support is excellent even if you have a very specific question about their network, there's none of the fluffing around I've seen with other providers. It's cost effective even for my non-existent budget. Put simply, I'm pleased as punch.

I'm not usually vocally supportive of companies, but they're doing quite a good job: this article is a little undeserved.

neom12• 13 years ago

We're going to be making an announcement about AMS late this week / early next.

nwh3• 13 years ago

Excited, thanks!

larrys3• 13 years ago

"with my running droplets"

Personally, I hate new names like this for old things.. [1]

Stop making up names for things. My brain doesn't want to learn a new language for something that can easily be called by the legacy name. It's wasted time and slows things down. (I'm exaggerating a bit of course but why do I have to learn something new of no value to me? And I'm reading this and someone is commenting calling things droplets and now I have to do a search to find out what a droplet is...)

Reminds me of some of Spike Lee's first films where he was more concerned with coming up with some creative oddity that could be linked to him. (If you've ever taken a film class you probably remember the prof talking about something that Hitchcock was doing in the film that had never been done before.)

[1] From DO website: "DigitalOcean calls its virtual servers, droplets; each droplet that you spin up is a new virtual server for your personal use. "

chc6• 13 years ago

I agree with this in many cases, but "Droplets" is really not difficult. Some providers invent whole new languages for perfectly mundane things. Digital Ocean just brands their virtual servers in a very straightforward way.

kossmoboleat• 13 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly. Especially in the domain of cloud providers the terms are very unclear. I suppose that's "cloud" is already such an extremely vague term.

I've written a short blog post about the over-use of buzzword in software here: http://timbenke.de/?p=881

corobo2• 13 years ago

Yes but they're droplets in a Digital Ocean. In this specific case I think it works very well with their branding.

If they'd have called it a Virtual Private Dedicated Serverlet or invented yet another useless acronym (YAUA, of course) I'd be agreeing, but droplet is simple and easy and as a bonus helps avoid the immediate "This is too techy for me!" attitude you can get when trying to convince a shared server user that the reason their site keeps going offline is because they need to upgrade to something better

networked• 13 years ago

Could someone who has used both DigitalOcean and RamNode say how they compare?

tigerweeds• 13 years ago

No experience with DO, but RamNode is very good. I've been a customer for over a year, and I rarely had any downtime. Disk speed is between 300MB and over 1GB (on SSD), network speed can go over 70MB/s.

disdev• 13 years ago

I have both RamNode and Digital Ocean servers in production.

In terms of performance and cost, both are great. I haven't ever had any issues with Digital Ocean. With RamNode, they've had a couple of issues where there's been minimal downtime. And they had a breach back in June, but responded well.

I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier and performance maybe slightly better.

staked2• 13 years ago

I used RamNode for a bit last year, but left them for DO after dealing with RamNode's servers getting DDoS'd constantly.

While I'm sure it happens with DO as well, at least there I don't feel like they're active participants in the various VPS provider feuds that you see all the time over at LowEndBox.

SudoAlex2• 13 years ago

Treat DigitalOcean as any other provider - something you can't trust, so always have backups of your own data in a place you trust (not a DigitalOcean snapshot) so you can restore when needed.

Personally I use Ansible http://www.ansibleworks.com/ and rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/, along with Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com/ for testing. So the day something happens with my droplet on DigitalOcean - I'll just run Ansible on a fresh server and restore the remaining data with rdiff-backup.

Yes, the lack of IPv6, being unable to use a virtual machines bootloader, a lack of a decent rescue image, and no private networking apart from one location sucks. However for the price - it's a good deal.

sksk2• 13 years ago

Would it be possible for you to describe your rdiff process a bit more? Do you dump the database periodically and backup that data or do you run rdiff on the binary data directory of your DB? Also, where is the rdiff backup data stored? I am guessing you would need another server for this and cannot be just Amazon S3? Thanks!

SudoAlex2• 13 years ago

On a local server at home, it's a low powered ARM box (QNAP TS-219 running Debian) with RAID1. The same thing could probably be done with a Raspberry Pi for lower costs if I was doing it now.

For database backups, you need a consistent snapshot of the data - something which might not happen if you attempt to access the data directly. Add a script to your daily crontab directory, such as:

mysqldump --skip-extended-insert --all-databases --single-transaction --master-data=2 --flush-logs | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz

Or:

sudo -u postgres pg_dumpall | gzip -9 --rsyncable > backup.sql.gz

Into a directory which rdiff-backup will download.

I always prefer to pull my backups from a local server I can trust instead of running a process on the server to push backups - if someone gains access to the server they could potentially destroy the backups if all the credentials are left on the server.

bigiain5• 13 years ago

Yep - I'm also using Ansible and Vagrant, in conjunction with machines on my home network, reverse ssh tunnels, and API manageable DNS. I'm working towards having services able to be dynamically/automatically moved between various VPS providers (Digital Ocean/AWS/Hetzner/NineFold) without me worrying (or even being aware) which VPS provider is currently being used.

legutierr2• 13 years ago

How would you do it in such a way that you are not even aware?

rsync• 13 years ago

Please accept our invitation to use rsync.net as the "backups of your own data in a place you trust".

The "HN Discount" is still granted to new customers that know to ask about it - and we have always supported rdiff-backup, which you mentioned.

We support ipv6 in our Denver and Zurich locations...

corobo2• 13 years ago

Definitely a happy customer! +1 to rsync.net. I've only ever had 2 issues there, both of which were resolved quickly and painlessly

The first of which was when my bank account suddenly got drained by a subscription plan to rsync - This later turned out to be an issue with the Paypal subscription, rsync refunded everything within an hour or so of me reporting the issue despite being on quite a different timezone, I was surprised someone was awake!

The second was that I was on somewhat of a very old contract (Going by emails I've been using them on this account since Sep 2010 and via nearlyfreespeech since March 2009, wow time flies!) and my storage space vs price was a bit off compared to their most recent pricing/HN offering. Quick ticket and within a couple of days everything was updated and I was on a much better pricing plan

More importantly than all of that, I've never lost data there - The only ever times I've been lacking a backup is when the backup was never pushed out to their servers in the first place due to my offsite script failing to run

As you can probably tell I'm a little bit of an rsync.net fanboy.. ahem :--)

simfoo• 13 years ago

Been using them for a few weeks now for a private Minecraft server (<= 6 people, whitelisted). Additionally it serves a statically generated map over nginx and I've been trying to get OpenVPN to work. It's a $10 one, 1 gig of RAM in Amsterdam.

Generally I'm quite happy so far. The setup process and the management panel is awesome while the CPU performance is lacking a bit. I/O performance (both disk and network) is great.

cmaxwe• 13 years ago

The font on that site is what really sucks... :-)

abjorn• 13 years ago

I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed the terrible typography.

JesseObrien• 13 years ago

I had to go in an remove the custom font CSS in chrome to get through that article. That font is absolutely terrible!

dangrossman• 13 years ago

There must be a reason the Chromium/Chrome team decides to displays custom fonts like that on Windows. They almost universally look terrible, or at least worse than every other browser and every other platform. No other browser renders them so thin that the lines of the glyphs become disconnected.

I opened a bug report about font rendering and text color issues in 2011. Not only is narrow text rendered oddly as you can see, but if you give it any color other than black, the rendered color doesn't match the color you specify in CSS. It can be way off, like blues rendering as purple. Last I checked, the bug was still open with no work done on it.

jahewson• 13 years ago

Chrome still uses the old Win32 API (GDI) to display fonts, whereas IE and FF are now using DirectWrite.

leephillips• 13 years ago

It's been a problem since Chrome's early days, on all platforms: http://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/

rallison• 13 years ago

Yup. It renders improperly on Chrome and Firefox, but properly on IE (at least, on IE10).

jpdlla2• 13 years ago

I'm currently using Ubiquity SSD Cloud Servers and I'm happy with them, but still find it weird that its not that popular. Anyone else using them? Any difference between them and DO?

akg_67• 13 years ago

It is not popular because the site lists all plans sold out, i.e. no new interest in the site.

jpdlla2• 13 years ago

I just noticed that and sent them a message about it. Thats definitely weird and not inviting at all. You can actually get more cloud servers once you signup.

veeti• 13 years ago

Are there any (decent) similar per-hour priced providers based in the EU? Any experiences or suggestions?

csmuk3• 13 years ago

There are no decent ones. I've tried them all now. Moved to DO and have had no problems so far.

TBH ALL the VPS providers are better than colo/cage suppliers from my experience who even at the high end are shit.

eCa• 13 years ago

I plan on setting up a vps at Gandi [0] shortly. Based on what I've heard they seem decent (not only as a domain registrar).

[0] https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy

kmike84• 13 years ago

I had awful experience with Gandi several years ago: ssh was broken on a newly created server (wrong permissions for some ssh folder), and CPU was limited in a fun way: processes periodically stopped to do CPU work for 200-300ms (once each second or so). We moved to Linode (they have servers in London), and for the same price got literally 20x faster performance (measured as rps), good support and flawless setup. Of course, things might have changed since that time.

j45• 13 years ago

I won't use DO for everything, but I won't use Linode for everything either, and that's ok. I also use dedicated servers with VMs and they all have their place and purpose quite nicely.

With tools like docker, it's less about where you're hosting and more about being able to deploy to any infrastructure, as the only guarantee you'll have for the rest of your life is you'll be redeploying somewhere, be it with the same host or another one.

I think for what you pay, what you get, and the level of flexibility, DO is a great value and service in that it's not a random, small, no name vps provider that may disappear due to not managing their resources between the fine line of over or under subscribing.

Where I wouldn't get a Linode and recommend someone to get shared hosting, I can start them on DO and let them grow there, so I quite like the segment they've let me introduce dedicated VPS resources to.

leddt2• 13 years ago

Does Docker run on Digital Ocean?

I tried to set it up a few months ago, without success. Maybe things have changed since.

Something to do with DO using LXC with a setup that wouldn't work with Docker.

AhtiK• 13 years ago

Docker in Ubuntu 13.x has been working great for me at DO. Just have to use a recent enough kernel.

DO itself is a full VM virtualization and afaik is not using kernel-level isolation/LXC.

neom12• 13 years ago

It sure does!

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

agildehaus• 13 years ago

Digital Ocean has a Ubuntu 13.04 x64 droplet preconfigured with Docker.

nodejscloud• 13 years ago

We https://commando.io use, love, and are sponsored by DigitalOcean. They've been awesome and amazing. The SliceHost of 2012/2013.

Some features we really want to see are when upgrading a droplet, the ability for the disk to increase in size. Right now, you have to image it, delete it, create a new droplet from the image, and pray that you keep the same IP address. Not a suitable solution for companies relying on uptime and stability.

Second, when creating a droplet, the ability to check a box, "ensure this droplet is provisioned on a different hypervisor then the rest of your droplets." Again, when building a highly available cluster, does absolutely no good if they are all on the same physical machine.

Finally, the ability to attach multiple ip addresses to a single droplet is a must have.

With that said, thanks DO, you guys rock!

Goopplesoft• 13 years ago

Commando.io rocks man! I actually use commando server management on digital ocean :)

The IP thing is definitely annoying especially since you're never guaranteed an IP (say you want to switch VMs) even in the same region. That and hard drive size which has definitely made me pay more than I should (when I don't need that much CPU/RAM but need the disk space). Otherwise great experience with them.

mrbill• 13 years ago

For just needing an off-site VM for backup-relay-host/testing/debugging purposes, you just can't beat $5/month. Been very happy with them, and the fact that I can just throw $50 into my account and not have to worry about it for almost a year.

csmuk3• 13 years ago

I run my web, email and some other stuff off a cheap end DO droplet for $5/month. Can't say I've had any problems other than availability of droplets in Amsterdam. I'm in the UK but have a VM in NY2. To be fair the latency feels about the same as our production kit which is 7 miles from my house, not 3460 miles. DO is less hops as well.

junto2• 13 years ago

What are you using for email? Did you find a good install guide?

breakall• 13 years ago

I don't know about the GP, but I used the "How To Install iRedMail On Ubuntu 12.04 x64"[1] guide on Digital Ocean's community site and was pretty successful in setting up my mail server, complete with postfix, dovecot, spamassasin, greylisting, ssl/tls, webmail, etc.

1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

csmuk3• 13 years ago

I wrote it up the other day conveniently. Here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750630

Basically, mutt, postfix, procmail.

ianbicking• 13 years ago

I do wish there was something akin to S3 to allow for larger amounts of storage, without necessarily being bundled in complete package that gets upgraded together (and there would be no SSD required). Obviously using S3 is still an option, but it would be nice to have the network locality and maybe even the general value proposition that DigitalOcean provides.

snoonan• 13 years ago

Yeah, it makes it hard for those of us with a lot of audio and video to deal with. We still need to be on Amazon for those assets, though would very much prefer to have them available through a locally mounted filesystem on our Digital Ocean instances.

bnycum• 13 years ago

Not seeing anyone here talk about it so maybe no one has had it happen to them, but how is everyone dealing with the disk failures? Seems like your one to two man startup could have a fun day ahead of them. Not to mention if it happened on your launch day. Coming from someone looking to use DO for a future project.

justinhj• 13 years ago

They do provide a backup service but personally I can rebuild everything from a github repo if it does go down.

Lazare• 13 years ago

Use something like Ansible (Puppet, Salt, Chef, whatever) to provision your servers, along with backups. You can also use DO disk images but they're not as good a solution; my Ansible playbooks will let me configure and deploy a fully functioning app or db server instance at the drop of a hat, on almost any infrastructure; a DO image is only good for deploying onto DO infrastructure.

If you're "in the cloud" (or hell, even if you're using your own bare iron servers), you need to be accepting that your server could just go away at any time (and Murphy's Law being what it is, probably at the worst possible time).

The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :)

elithrar2• 13 years ago

The real trick is figuring out how to handle backups and user data properly. It's easy to say "you need to plan for your main DB server going poof"; it's harder to actually make sure you can handle that without downtime and loss of user data. :)

Exactly this.

My little side project is fairly minimal, but users are paying for services. If the site goes down before my next backup, I'm going to have to reverse some charges (and look bad in the process!). One option might/would be to run failover on a $5 droplet, but then I also need to cluster Redis (server-side sessions), etc, etc... and it starts to become an "operations" side project and not a "product" side project. I'm using Puppet to automate the build process (and will build a "hot spare" image to get things up faster), but backups and failover are still tricky problems to solve.

Thaxll• 13 years ago

You still can't boot your own kernel...

Nux2• 13 years ago

"yum install kernel" then modify grub.conf?

tshtf• 13 years ago

Nope.

DigitalOcean's has been ignoring customer requests about this for 18 months on this:

https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...

It's really hard to take them seriously when you have to wait patiently for kernel updates that include critical security fixes.

perryh2• 13 years ago

What are some use cases that you have for running your own kernel? I just can't think of much need of running a custom kernel. There's a lot of different kernel versions to choose from. For subsystems like process scheduling, you can just load your own kernel module to change that.

yrro• 13 years ago

Their kernels are all months out of date. And besides, I want to install updates as they are released by my distribution, rather than have to wait around for my host to get their arse in gear.

viraptor• 13 years ago

What I'm really looking forward to is better IP management. So far it looks like most cloud servers providers try to ignore the issue, which I'm really disappointed about. It looks like DO's answer to droplet failures is - set up a load balancer. OK, but what happens is that droplet disappears? What protection can I have against going completely offline for the duration of DNS TTL in that case? (And the time of manually changing it)

I see that as an unacceptable risk really - one thing that keeps me from using DO. Other services also lack the reserved IPS sometimes, but some of them at least provide an integrated solution (LBaaS style).

CSDude• 13 years ago

I use DigitalOcean, my application is not very large but response time is important. 20 GB is more than enough for me, even 10 GB would be enough. Being it SSD, it runs the short lived disk-based tasks I give (compilation & copying moving files) very fast due to its SSD, compared to AWS and others. This is my usecase and I am happy with it.

johnpowell5• 13 years ago

Yesterday I went to pay my bill and it said "Automated Abuse Detection - Account Verification". Luckily I was able to ftp in and do a back-up.

After some back and forth my account was reinstated. It wasn't a huge deal but a shitty way to start my day. And after asking multiple times I was never told the reason why I had to go through this.

I had been happy until now. This just left a bad taste in my mouth.

edit: What pissed me off was having to send in a copy of my government issued ID.

jzwinck• 13 years ago

How would you like them to handle it? Fraud and abuse is a big problem, and government ID is a standard way to sort out who is who.

johnpowell5• 13 years ago

Telling me why I was suspected of fraud and abuse would be a good start.

Another edit: I got a helpful reply.

There has been a response to your ticket:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide further information with regard to our backend abuse filters.

If we may be of any further assistance, please do let us know.

Regards, * Mitchell | Support Team

driverdan• 13 years ago

A government ID is useless without a way to verify its authenticity. It's pretty easy to photoshop a fake one.

neom12• 13 years ago

Hey John,

For sure it's a pain in the ass and we've been discussing another verification methods, as I'm sure you can imagine, with adding 100s of accounts a day we need to make sure the public internet and our internal networks are relatively protected from someone spinning up vms for DDoS but also from compromised boxes and accounts.

If we publicly revealed how to trigger our verification process (that genuinely does a good job of protecting our network and customers) I'd imagine people would work to figure out ways to circumvent it. Occasionally we trigger a false positive, but I really believe that it's important to have this system in place.

I appreciate your feedback, and I'll make sure your comments get discussed at our next product meeting.

johnpowell5• 13 years ago

See, here are my concerns.

1: I wasn't notified that there was any problem with my account. 2: I have no idea what the repercussions of being suspected of fraud entails. Will my sites be shut down and if so then when? 3: I was only informed that something was wrong when I logged in and tried to give you money.

So what would have happened if I had paid for six months of hosting in advance (like I have done in the past)?

For fucks sake. Send off a email so I am not frantically backing up databases while waiting for my ticket to get replied to.

alecsmart1• 13 years ago

I had the exact same issue. I launched a new droplet and installed Tomcat. Then got busy with other stuff. The next day I get an email that my droplet has been used for DDOSing. And am like clueless as it was a fresh droplet. I ask them more details about the attack but they do not reveal anything. I don't even know which files were responsible and where they directed the traffic to. They disable the droplet completely. The password for the server was their default created one so I don't think a security breach really happened. In over 7 years of working with plenty of hosts, this is the first time this has happened.

junto2• 13 years ago

I recently setup my first droplet and I have negligible experience with unix administration. This guide was extremely useful:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/initial-serv...

Don't miss "Step Five— Configure SSH (OPTIONAL)".

My assumption is that my droplet is considerably safer than it was to start with.

Next step: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-prote...

ilaksh• 13 years ago

The title is very stupid especially since he is actually giving them a recommendation.

Anyway it comes down to the fact that its cheaper than any other large provider out there and almost always works very well. No one can beat that price with an actual usable service.

If I was going to complain about anything it would be the current lack of 2GB/4GB etc. droplets in San Francisco and the fact that launching a droplet from a smaller snapshot takes several minutes instead of one minute.

renang• 13 years ago

  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.84315 s, 279 MB/s

I was expecting it too be faster, actually. I get over 300 MB/s on a VPS with HDD at the company I work at. [1]

[1] https://true.nl

joosters• 13 years ago

The dd command is copying from /dev/zero

I wouldn't entirely trust any disk benchmark writing empty files, you might be running into some FS optimisations there.

And 300MB/s on a single spinning disk? No chance!

icelancer• 13 years ago

I am pleased with DO but they overpromise way too often, or at least they used to. We were supposed to be able to install instances from ISO in 2012 as promised by their support tickets:

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

It was last updated ONE YEAR AGO. Come on, that is outrageous.

shan1991058• 13 years ago

I want to say that I hate Digital Ocean as well. I am a University of Waterloo Computer Science student. I have CS 458 (computer security) this term. We had an assignment last month asking us to get all the users permission without knowing their password for a web app. Then I wrote a script. The use of the script is to use curl one time per second (may be longer, due to the connection issue) to guess all the different combination of the password. Of course I was using that script on Digital Ocean!

After running it two days, I receive an email saying their router find out that I was doing the DDOS and ask me to stop it. I stop the script immediately and reply them my reason telling them that I was doing it for University Assignment and I don't know that I was not allowed to do this. However, my account got suspends anyway. No matter how I send emails to beg them to give back my files in the server (I use the server for emacs and tmux to write codes for school projects), they just told me that sorry but my account is suspend. No matter how I beg them, all I received back from the email is just a max two line saying that my account is suspend. They do tell me that it suspends forever. After several days they deleted my account with all my files in it. Now I have no ways to get any of my files back! I feel ... so angry and hate so much about the digital ocean.

Is this how a normal American Company does? Will a normal American Company suspends customers account because that customer use it to do university work? I can understand it suspends me if I violate any laws but I was just doing an assignment and not violates anything. It also ignore the apology from the customer. Any evidence the customer provides is ignored gets well. Even that after couple days, digital ocean deleted that customer's account with all his files permanently!

This is my story. This is the reason why I hate Digital Ocean!!!!!!

oahziur2• 13 years ago

well, this should be another case that digital ocean sucks. bad customer services plus not return important files after suspend.

mikeyen4• 13 years ago

I like to see DO put a process in place to resolve this kind of issue by require the user to have recorded Skype/google hangout session to verify I'd, credit card, etc. once the id is verified, face recorded , user is understand and agree fix the ddos type errors, the account should be restored.

aroch• 13 years ago

So, you violated their ToS, specifically that you're not allowed to do things that are abusive. Attempting to bruteforce a login is abusive. You admitted that you were in fact doing something against their ToS to them in a ticket. They don't know it's for a university assignment and chasing down your professor to confirm it is an assignment isn't something that's reasonable for you to expect them to do.

You violated their Terms, plain and simple. They don't owe you a second chance or your data.

As a side note, surely a CS major knows they should keep backups of every thing. Better yet, shove your text/code files into git and have backups AND versioning.

shan1991058• 13 years ago

I do tell them several times and apologies for 5 times. Also I provide my student id and assignment page.

They told me that my files are safe at first. However they still deleted my account with all my files in it

shan1991058• 13 years ago

I do have version control but backups. I am just angry with their attitude on how they talk to a customer

bigiain5• 13 years ago

As another Digital Ocean user - I'll just say I'm happy to hear that other people running DDOS and/or dictionary attacks from the same IP pool I'm relying on get slapped down _hard_, and that excuses like "but I'm doing this for a Uni assignment!" don't give you a free run to be a bad actor in their (and "my") netblock.

Do you _really_ think you have a "right" to run a dictionary attack from someone else's network? _Seriously?_

Personally - from looking at my fail2ban logs, I wish Amazon - and even more usefully, large residential cable/adsl providers - would implement this sort of pro-active monitoring of user/customer behavior.

shan1991058• 13 years ago

I think you are misunderstood. The target for that dictionary attack is the UW virtual hosted machine!

shan1991058• 13 years ago

Sorry that I didn't read your post carefully. I did not know that I cannot run a dictionary attack from their network. I admit that I made the mistake. I do tell them that I was wrong and stop the script immediately after I receive the notice. It's just I do not think that I deserve a penalty with destroy my account and all my files.

harshreality• 13 years ago

Who ran the webapp and its server? Did that person know that there was a class assignment to brute force passwords?

If so, who complained to digitalocean?

If not, your professor should be fired, because the assignment encouraged students to break the law. Forget DigitalOcean's TOS. Attacking a server without permission is a crime.

shan1991058• 13 years ago

The University of Waterloo hosted the virtual server for assignment use. The webapp is made for the assignment host on that virtual uml server. That server is the server I do the brute force.

No one complained to digital ocean. The digital ocean told me that they detected the attack by their router.

I am not attack any other servers. What I attacked is the specific virtual server hosted by university of waterloo itself.

asb2• 13 years ago

This is absolute rubbish. Let's have a look at the Waterloo CS 458 assignments: <http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~dstinson/CS_458/F13/F13-slides.... Every one of those assignments that has you do practical work has you do it against a Waterloo-hosted virtual machine (as obviously anything else would be potentially illegal).

shan1991058• 13 years ago

I think there are some kind of misunderstand here. What I did attacking is the Waterloo-hosted virtual machine! I was brute force the password of users of a web app hosted on that machine. I ask the professor before doing that and the professor said i am allowed to do that

mediaserf• 13 years ago

I use ksplice to run my own OS & kernel on Digital Ocean, you don't have to stick with their templates.

pritambaral• 13 years ago

Do you ksplice-patch your kernels on every boot?

cauliturtle• 13 years ago

with the first 3 points of the cons, no doubt to use DO rather than other cloud service for small/personal stuffs

eschulte• 13 years ago

I don't use digital ocean because https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/image-updat...

amree2• 13 years ago

I'm still waiting for a data center in Asia

zzzaim• 13 years ago

Me too. Curious, have you tried using the US data centers from Asia? If so, how is the speed like?

amree2• 13 years ago

Ping result shows that I'm getting around 200ms (from Malaysia)

thepoet• 13 years ago

It's about 250ms from India

jbverschoor• 13 years ago

Unresponsive droplets here

kenkam• 13 years ago

You know Disqus has taken over English when OP asks us to disquss on Hacker News.

BrokenPipe• 13 years ago

I really dislike DigitalOcean. Terrible customer services. And do not give them a way to bill you automatically, use something like paypal when YOU are in control and can just not buy the credit and run out.

damell• 13 years ago

Thanks for the opinion. I have been considering moving my server to DigitalOcean for a while and this assured me I probably won't regret it

fruks• 13 years ago

Feels like a perfect place to host your hobby projects but nothing for serious business

evanprodromou• 13 years ago

I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean; great value and good quality.

If I had any complaint, it's that occasionally I get a droplet with a wonky IP address that seems to be shared with another host (like, the SSH host key wobbles between one and the other between invocations of ssh).

There was also some flakiness with NYC2 a couple of weeks ago, which caused some sadness and grief.

All in all, they're saving me multiple thousands of dollars.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

What's with all the outdated OS images on DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean Sucks. Use DigitalOcean

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