First few weeks on Digital Ocean

As I mentioned recently, I moved my hosting to Digital Ocean (link is referral code). All these comments apply to a 20GB instance I have operated in the nyc2 region for about 2 weeks, the sum total of my experience with Digital Ocean.

My needs are modest: I run this personal blog (python), a moin wiki, and some miscellaneous other web-facing stuff. I've selected the most basic 20GB disk / 512MB RAM / 1 core droplet size, which costs $5 a month.

Overall I'm happy with what I'm getting for the price I'm paying, and my sites are substantially more responsive than when I operated them on dreamhost. But there are some caveats:

• The available graphs (instantaneous transfer, CPU, and disk) are unreliable -- sometimes it is hours or even days between updates, sometimes multiple updates per hour (based on communication with DigitalOcean, this problem may be worst in the nyc2 region)
• "Real Time" graphs never seem to be realtime. If you want to look at a fresh graph, you have to reload the page and then click "graphs".
• Graphs aren't available via API. Discussion of graphs here
• I/O, Bandwidth and pystones are somewhat variable
  • Bonnie++ zcav gives 579MB/s (st dev is 40% of mean) over a 20GB /dev/vda—apparently not data-dependent compression, fast spots move around from run to run
  • Other performance measures vary as shown below (now based on 818 hourly tests):

    statistic	mean		std dev		Units
    pystones	103229.1	±	15757.1	(15.3%)	Pystone/s
    ping	14.9	±	1.1	(7.3%)	ms
    down	24.5	±	9.0	(36.6%)	Mbit/s
    up	49.7	±	29.6	(59.6%)	Mbit/s

  • Apache file transfer as measured by 'ab' from remote is not as fast as speed measured by speedtest-cli, but that's probably my own lack of tuning
  • Contrary to my expectations, there was not a clear daily or weekly component to performance variations.
• No IPV6 yet. They recommend setting up IPV6 tunneling. Here's the discussion at DigitalOcean. I've set up tunneling using http://tunnelbroker.net and it seems fine with very low latency to their New York POP.
• You have to host your own DNS to add AAAA records. This is no big deal as I already hosted my own DNS.

Update, December 25, 2013: An earlier version of this page was inaccurate, particularly about pricing. An e-mail from digitalocean clarified that the price of the small droplet is capped at $5/month (and so on for other droplet sizes), so (now-deleted) my calculations based on per-minute pricing were wrong. They also clarified that IP addresses are never changed for a droplet as long as it is active, and that the degree of performance variation I measured is more or less what was expected. I also deleted some items about bandwidth quotas and monitoring because apparently no bandwidth charges are being made at present.

Update, January 9, 2014: Update statistics based on 818 hourly tests. I got tired of getting the hourly results in my mailbox, so that's the last update I expect to do.

Entry first conceived on 21 December 2013, 3:53 UTC, last modified on 27 January 2014, 18:03 UTC
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