A few months ago, I posted how I switched to Digital Ocean, as my hosting service provider. I haven’t really came back to it, so today I thought I’d just give a quick update.

Site Became Unresponsive

It’s been with Digital Ocean since Jan. 16th and can say I’ve had a few issues with them. The first issue was the server this blog is on, became unresponsive and had some issues with MySQL. Luckily, I had backups enabled for the server (Yes, they offer full server backups!), so all I had to do was create a new “droplet” from the backup that happened the night before, change my DNS to the point to the new IP address and that was it. During this, I did speak with their support, and they not only provided me this solution, but continued to look into the issue, but they also gave me a monetary value for the “inconvenience” I had met. I definitely didn’t need it, but hey, it paid for hosting for the month, so that was pretty cool!

Data Loss

My second “issue” I had with them, happened a short time ago, where they had a RAID fail (I think, having trouble remembering the thing now), that contained my reputation I created, that I based all my servers from. This was sort of bummer, because I had spent some time going through installing everything (git, php, apache, mysql, etc.), but it wasn’t a big deal, since I could always create a new reputation off one of my existing servers and just blow away the website directory that was there. This gave me my image back, which I quickly saved as a new image so I can set up a new server again, when I need to.

Oh Well…

So as you can see, it seems as though I should be running from this host, but I’m not. I’ve been continually impressed with they guys (and gals!), and though I’ve experienced a couple of issues people would run from I’m not running. I’ve been treated well, and it hasn’t been a big deal since I’ve been smart keeping my websites on separate servers (hey it’s pretty inexpensive!!), so creating an image is pretty easy to pull out the domain specific stuff from it.

I absolutely love these guys! I get to play around with server setups and get to have more of the control I was looking for from a host for relatively inexpensive cost to me. But more importantly I get to spend more time building web apps and blogging (although I seem to be slacking the past 2 months).