from Hacker News

I broke up with Digitalocean, here’s the story

by start123 on 1/13/22, 6:23 PM with 24 comments

• by boole1854 on 1/13/22, 6:53 PM

  Without warning and without contacting us first, Digital Ocean blocked public IP access to one of our critical production servers on a Friday evening on the basis of a third-party security firm reporting to them that we were hosting a phishing page. We were, in fact, not hosting a phishing page. If DO had done minimal due diligence before blocking us they could have confirmed this. However, it took until the next Monday before DO support responded to our explanations that the phishing report was a false positive and unblocked our IP.

  We moved to AWS.

• by jonnycomputer on 1/13/22, 6:55 PM

  Can I just say that the "relationship" theme of this article comes off as a tad ... creepy? Completely detracts from the substantive content.

  >many years ago when we both were young. It was love at first sight – The elegant UI, the ease of use, the dirt-cheap price was everything I was looking for in a partner.

  >There was no downtime, highly reliable as a partner and supported me with every problem I faced in life.

  >I understood how to work with her and things to expect from her. Never before had she let me down. It was smooth sailing until recently when problems in our relationship started to surface. She expected more from me and wanted to change me.

• by theamk on 1/13/22, 6:33 PM

  I expected billing problems, or maybe reliability problems, or maybe horrible support... but the reasons turned out to be: "would not let me assign a floating IP to her load balancer." and "does not have integrated DDoS protection"

  Someone really had pampered life -- this does not look like core functionality at all. I'd expect any service to have limitations like those.

• by Syonyk on 1/13/22, 6:52 PM

  That's a pretty... bizarre set of things to whine about.

  If you want to grumble about DO for stuff, their absolutely scattered performance on lower end instances is a better one, though for how cheap the bandwidth is, it can be made to work. And when things like CloudFlare exist, I can't fault DO for not duplicating that sort of behavior.

• by start123 on 1/13/22, 6:55 PM

  I am the author here. Let me give you more context on this.

  1. My Saas platform supports custom domains including naked domains and not just subdomains so it is important for me that the IP address remains the same when I add more capacity. I am running a single large droplet as of now and when I tried to add more instance + LB, DO wouldn't let me do that. Several people have asked this feature if you look in their forums. Unless I run and manage my own Haproxy/Nginx boxes, I cannot scale up.

  2. This is currently a side project and I do not have additional time to maintain more resources which is why I am willing to spend more on a platform that provides me these features. This is not due to laziness as some people have commented.

• by Guest42 on 1/13/22, 6:40 PM

  "I heard AWS is single...."

  Not something I'd expect from someone who has used DO for years.

• by nvr219 on 1/13/22, 6:53 PM

  I use vultr just because it's super easy... No idea if it's better or worse than DO or Linode or whatever but it does what I need it to do.

• by riffic on 1/13/22, 7:03 PM

  The DigitalOcean Load Balancer uses a floating IP address under the hood, btw.