I just created a droplet today, and was trying for the life of me to figure out what I would have done so early on in setting it up to cause it to become unresponsive. Glad to see it's not just me. It's not really a great sign though, as I was hoping to use this fairly frequently. Is this a common occurrence, or do I just have bad luck? If so, I'll definitely have to find another solution.
I'm not too qualified to comment on the hosting market, but I do want to vouch for DigitalOcean as I've never had uptime issues with them until now. They also have always had timely and helpful support and their pricing is obviously competitive.
That being said, near 100% uptime is really desired in this space and I've been scratching my head for the past hour or so wondering why I couldn't connect to my mongo process running on my droplet...maybe I should have tested DO sooner, but the fact that only mongo seemed to be failing (and not postgres for example) made me think I had client and not server issues.
I've been using Linode for many years, and DO for some time now (a year? not sure, since I can't even login to their control panel right now and check). I've seen issues on both providers, and dealt with support of both not too infrequently.
I'd still say Linode is miles ahead in terms of expertise and responsiveness. Most of my servers are on Linode for this reason, and only a few on DO.
As a customer I enjoy this competition and would like to keep both players compete - because I'm benefiting from it. So I'm likely to stick to both. But I would still recommend Linode more easily than I would DO.
Thanks for your input. I might be switching over as a result of the recent downtime and the support Linode has been receiving on this thread. Unfortunately, especially for non-hobbyist apps and services, this is an area demanding fickleness.
The big issue here is NYC2 droplets went down only 7 days ago. This time its even longer at over an a half. When it happened last week it was unfortunate, but things happen. When it happens twice in a week that is a much bigger problem.
