On: Scalability is overrated

[jaequery]

I just moved away from GCP to DigitalOcean and went from paying over $1k a month to $100 a month.

At this phase of the startup, we aren’t missing a beat.

[147 → jaequery]

Starting out on Digital Ocean or Heroku is usually a great idea.

I consult with companies that are looking to move in the other direction, from Digital Ocean to AWS.

Their biggest pain points as they grew are:

1. The lack of granular permissions scoping and access control.

2. The networking primitives in Digital Ocean ended up being too restrictive. For example, they wanted to have static egress IPs and it was much harder to do that in Digital Ocean than AWS.

3. The need for more of the managed services AWS offers.

[JanSt → jaequery]

I‘m also running everything on DO. Dead simple and good pricing.

[eastbound → jaequery]

Do you have live backups of the DB and encrypted disks, or did you have to set it up yourself?

[jaequery → eastbound]

DO has a hosted database which handles automated backups.

[nordsieck → jaequery]

> I just moved away from GCP to DigitalOcean

Did you compare between DO, Lightsail, Vultr, Linode, etc. or was the difference between that tier of offering so little that you just picked one and ran with it?

[jaequery → nordsieck]

I picked DO because they were the only one who had a hosted database offering (Postgres).

[osigurdson → jaequery]

The market wants cloud to be a commodity - I’m certain it will get what it wants eventually.