[[Herd Migration]]
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I'm using Digital Ocean right now, and there are some things I like about them and some things I don't. Mind if I ask your opinions of your old and new hosts?
Not at all, I’ve been using Digital Ocean for years and still do for some sites. Their admin panel is fantastic and they have a lot of really convenient features (one of my favorites that I miss is their CDN, Spaces, and how seamlessly it handles SSL). I recommend them still for ease of use, but have been moving away for 2 reasons:
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Cost. Their prices are increasing, in a world where hardware costs are otherwise going down, and that’s on top of already high-ish prices. DO is good but if I wanted to pay I’d at least want to get the reliability and ecosystem of AWS etc. $6-7/mo for a 1 vCPU/1GB ram VPS is too much for a “tier 2” provider and you’ll easily need to move to $12-14/mo for what I think should be base (1 vCPU/2GB ram).
Comparatively, Hetzner’s base US config is $5/mo for 2 vCPU/2GB, already better than DO’s upgrade. Their next level is like $9/mo for 3 vCPU/4GB ram and the differences become exponential the higher you go. The value is fantastic and there are cheaper deals if you don’t mind an EU datacenter.
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IP credibility. I didn’t realize this beforehand but I’ve been running my own email server on DO for 4 years and their IP credibility is sadly not good. Worse than competitors, and I’ve had a lot of issues getting caught in spam filters and working with providers to re-whitelist my IP. This is with DMARC/etc all setup properly. Apparently their IP blocks have been used by bad actors a lot and we pay that price.
Hetzner has been really good so far and their admin panel is solid, not as easy and feature-rich as DO’s but still very good. Their value and reliability has been great so far IME and I’ve moved my other federated services there.
FWIW I’m also using Backblaze B2 and would recommend them too.
Happy to answer any specific questions too!
Appreciate it! I've bookmarked this post so I can come back to it next time I'm thinking about switching.
Most of my sites see very little traffic, so I'm not worried about a lack of processing power, but I am worried about overpaying. When DO increased the price of their basic droplet a year or two ago, my reaction was that I'd already been paying for something I wasn't getting full use out of.
Plus I occasionally see something that makes me think DO doesn't have their act together. Like, the RSS feed for their status blog was broken for the better part of a year. They were still posting statuses, and they knew the feed was broken, it just took them that long to fix it.
On the other hand, their documentation and tutorials are great, which I definitely value. And, let's be honest, I'm settled and comfortable and it would probably take something significant to motivate me to move.
A couple of my sites (including HouseDraft which I've linked here before) are hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech instead. It costs about $20/year for a mostly-static site, but the company seems to be run by grumpy, opinionated old sysadmins whom I hope I never have to ask for help. There's a question in their FAQ that asks "Is your service easy to use?" and the answer is "No."
Yes I agree with all of this, most of mine see very little traffic as well. I have personal Pixelfed/Mastodon instances that are basically me talking to myself and even at their lowest tiers I just can't justify the price anymore sadly. $14/mo for just the Mastodon droplet and backups (Rails needs at least 2GB of RAM to compile assets!) just isn't sustainable. Moving was a huge pain and I stayed with DO for the same reason you said (and I think that's totally fine), but I finally broke recently when I could cut the price to 1/3 at Hetzner.
Big +1 on DO's docs/guides too, I've used their guides on nginx, certbot, and many others quite a bit and they're very well maintained.
I've variously come across NearlyFreeSpeech before and for tiny static sites that seems like a great deal. I actually may even prefer the grumpy sysadmins at this phase 😜
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