Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

DO's network performance gets... iffy under serious load. Or sometimes just has consistently-terrible throughput and/or latency to certain addresses, for unclear reasons (I have a suspicion their peering agreements and interconnects are simply awful for a lot of routes—probably as a cost-saving measure). You may not notice any of this on hobbyist or small-time commercial projects, but it's a real problem.

So that's one difference. AWS is expensive, and its performance tiers for stuff like networking can be frustratingly opaque, but when you pay enough, you do get more-or-less what you paid for. And fighting DO's networking can get expensive in a hurry, in lost business or technician hours.

As for Amplify vs. Ansible, yeah, dunno.

[EDIT] Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've seen hosting of this general sort fall apart at the networking level—I ran into very similar problems with RackSpace over a decade ago, there was simply no way to come anywhere near taxing the hardware we were paying for before the pipe got saturated, like, there was an order-of-magnitude mismatch between the two, requests timing out en masse while the hardware ("what a good bargain this price is!") was practically idle.

[EDIT EDIT] It's probably no coincidence that it's easy to list and understand hardware specs, but difficult to communicate or evaluate real-world Internet-connected network performance without trying it—so it's probably tempting as hell to scrimp on networking while selling based on bang-for-the-buck in hardware allocation.



I've run IRC bots on several VPS services, and connectivity on DO was by far the most unreliable. It's crazy how often they would randomly drop out, even under no load.


Yeah, for some addresses that have no trouble whatsoever with AWS we've seen crazy-high dropped packet rates from DO. Sometimes, but not always, it's the reason for perceived extreme slowness from them, though other times they're just routing through some connection, somewhere along the way, that's about as wide as a straw, for whatever reason. Non-North-American addresses tend to get it the worst, but we've seen it with US and Canadian ones, too. AWS? Smooth sailing for all, from datacenters physically located near the DO ones we were using.

With DO we'll have some clients seeing great performance, and others who may as well be on a spotty dial-up connection at the exact same time. Frustrating, and there's not really anything you can do about it except switch to another host. I'd love to know what the story is with 'em.


Curious what you've found to be reliable / would recommend?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: