75 engineers on Hacker News describe using DigitalOcean first-hand: 18 endorse it, 8 regret it, 6 are mixed.
“with a horrid I/O that can't even run a static site (we tried to migrate)”
regret · production · oscarcp · 2026-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“digital ocean managed cluster forced an update that crashed all servers; and there was no sane way to fix it.”
regret · production · 1.5 yr · wouldbecouldbe · 2023-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Moving to DO with plenty of headroom is a 10th of the cost of AWS!”
endorse · production · firecall · 2023-05-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Digital Ocean blocked public IP access to one of our critical production servers on a Friday evening”
regret · production · boole1854 · 2022-01-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've hosted sites on DO for several years, never had any problems with them. On the few occasions I had to contact their support I got a reply right away.”
endorse · production · gregjor · 2021-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Self-hosting on Linode or Digital Ocean is cheap and easy.”
endorse · production · mig39 · 2021-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to Digital Ocean ... simply because of their predictable pricing model, and that worked very well for us”
endorse · production · _benj · 2021-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to Digital Ocean after that and that problem went away and had an all you can eat set of arguably better systems”
endorse · production · samaman · 2021-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to digitalocean once they had managed kubernetes. It's such a pleasure to not have to worry about it and also much cheaper.”
endorse · production · csnweb · 2020-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if you're considering DO at all for production, subscribe to their status page for a steady stream of incidents to your inbox.”
regret · production · kohanz · 2020-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“using the DO's Postgres cheapest plan (still pretty expensive imo)”
mixed · production · erikrothoff · 2020-09-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This cut out monthly hosting costs by 80% and vastly simplified our entire setup. We also saw some solid performance gains”
endorse · production · james33 · 2020-04-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every site would go down at some point monthly: error connecting to database, Apache crashed, etc... couldn't get any support on it.”
regret · production · searcheye · 2020-03-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they responded by asking for incorporation documents, which was frankly bizarre”
regret · personal · vsl · 2019-06-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A small Kubernetes cluster and hosted Postgres does not cost much there and is very easy to setup. But their hosted Kubernetes and Postgres services are still in "early access"”
mixed · production · vbsteven · 2019-04-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use DO for my personal website and pet projects and it works well.”
endorse · personal · paraditedc · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“all my personal projects are with Digital Ocean I love how clean and minimal everything is.”
endorse · personal · elymar · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we built our own Digital Ocean $5 box and gradually start sending emails that were NOT spam.”
endorse · production · joering2 · 2018-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I simply SSH into my Digital Ocean server and can work smoothly from anywhere.”
endorse · personal · santa_boy · 2017-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we run a series of tier-2 services on DO and it's been great for our use cases.”
endorse · production · danpalmer · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I host on Digital Ocean but I use their new block storage solution so that a growing db does not become unwieldy/expensive.”
endorse · production · hardcopy · 2016-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Everything but the largest communities fit fine on a $20/month, 2 CPU, 2GB ram DO droplet.”
endorse · production · codinghorror · 2016-01-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“performance is much better for me with DigitalOcean. The only thing I dont like about DigitalOcean droplets is the requirement to shut off the server before resizing”
mixed · production · 2 yr · usaphp · 2015-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was a bit awkward having our everyone using my personal email as the login, and the boss's credit card on the billing page.”
regret · production · cshimmin · 2015-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“backups were unreliable, and support didn't really have a good answer as for why the backups were so unreliable.”
regret · production · pangram · 2014-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our forums on DO as well and it hasn't caused a hiccup at all. Uptime has been great... there isn't enough tooling around DO for me to be comfortable”
mixed · production · brryant · 2014-04-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DO consistently beats the price performance.”
endorse · production · recmend · 2014-03-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I am going to keep machines at Digital Ocean, but they have had the most failures/downtime I have seen from any host that I've used”
mixed · production · AJ007 · 2014-02-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated our entire infrastructure from EC2 to DigitalOcean around October(ish?) 2013. In that time period there have been 3 significant data centre outages”
mixed · production · quickdry21 · 2014-01-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DigitalOcean has a solid platform for the price, and we've personally had great experiences with them”
endorse · production · Pyramids · 2014-01-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have both RamNode and Digital Ocean servers in production. I think I trust Digital Ocean more. The setup is easier”
endorse · production · disdev · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to DigitalOcean a month ago. The servers are 2x faster than rackspace (same RAM size) and we pay only half the price.”
endorse · production · fotcorn · 2013-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm running a Hermes agent as of recently on a DigitalOcean VM that only accepts connections from my devices”
neutral · personal · nameless912 · 2026-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm able to set up AWS EC2 instances or digital ocean droplets, a bunch of game servers spin up”
neutral · personal · sovietmudkipz · 2025-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My setup is a digital ocean box with docker compose scripts and watchtower for deploys.”
neutral · production · distortionfield · 2024-06-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run all of this out of Digital Ocean's nyc datacenter.”
neutral · production · nightowl_games · 2024-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“so we switched server to Digitalocean.”
neutral · production · actionfromafar · 2023-08-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mailinabox on a droplet, on a domain I own.”
neutral · personal · foobarbecue · 2022-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“connecting privately in production to a Postgres managed database on DigitalOcean”
neutral · production · bsnnkv · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was easy enough to set it up on DigitalOcean. My primary objective was my own identity.”
neutral · personal · 8ytecoder · 2022-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“multiple django sites and static sites on a single digital ocean droplet.”
neutral · production · rudasn · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If I tell them "I have Digital Ocean, I maintain the load balancer myself, the database myself, ELK myself"”
neutral · production · laurent92 · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had been using DO for eight years or so”
neutral · personal · 8 yr · adventured · 2021-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run notebooks on the Kubernetes clusters (AWS' EKS, GCP's GKE, Azure's AKS, or DigitalOcean) of the users”
neutral · production · Jugurtha · 2021-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated away from our $3k/mo AWS bill back in the day to save $2k/mo with DO.”
neutral · production · welder · 2021-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated our stuff from DigitalOcean around 2018.”
neutral · production · atombender · 2020-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After failing with Heroku we migrated to using Dokku on DO.”
neutral · production · jdance · 2020-02-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our disks in London went down at about 8:45pm UTC ... and DO recovery message was sent out at about 2am UTC.”
neutral · production · dc352 · 2019-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm running https://zerosearch.io on a single 16gb standard instance with 6 vcpus on Digital Ocean”
neutral · production · it · 2019-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm running this on a low-end Digital Ocean droplet”
neutral · production · molsson · 2019-07-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Kops with Digital Ocean for some time on-and-off”
neutral · personal · yebyen · 2018-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Digital Ocean and it wasn't there”
neutral · production · pbadenski · 2018-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DigitalOcean for hosting, and as a business we use Cloudflare for DNS”
neutral · personal · gtf21 · 2018-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've setup a DigitalOcean instance of PiHole [1] VPN where I have added all the Facebook domains[2]”
neutral · personal · medius · 2018-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have my own VPS on DigitalOcean. Maintenance of that node is insignificant though, as the machine auto-updates itself.”
neutral · personal · bad_user · 2018-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One of my old staging subdomains had an old Digital Ocean address left in it for a bit while we migrated some servers”
neutral · production · tinix · 2018-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have it running for a small team on a Digital Ocean Droplet”
neutral · production · lttlrck · 2018-05-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used a 16Gb Digital Ocean box, and a separate box to run benchmarks from.”
neutral · personal · jbramble81 · 2017-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my droplet in digital ocean was failing to compile”
neutral · personal · G4BB3R · 2017-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use this as well on DigitalOcean. It's easy to create new certs and put them on my various devices”
neutral · personal · SystemOut · 2016-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“sync to a CouchDB 2.0 database in Digital Ocean.”
neutral · production · PaulMest · 2016-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I even have Cloud9 on a Digital Ocean droplet for one project”
neutral · personal · martin-adams · 2016-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a news site that gets about 500K uniques a month off a $20 instance on Digital Ocean”
neutral · production · jawngee · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Performance of their SSD VMs is better than Linode's and DO's VMs in our internal benchmarks.”
neutral · personal · St-Clock · 2016-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we're using $5/month Digital Ocean instances”
neutral · production · erichocean · 2016-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run Cachet on a $5/mo Digital Ocean Droplet on the East Coast for redundancy”
neutral · production · cyberferret · 2016-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use DO as a test bed for a lot of stuff.”
neutral · personal · krinchan · 2016-02-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“As backend framework we're using Laravel hosted on digital ocean.”
neutral · production · Idered · 2015-07-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DigitalOcean for cloud hosting”
neutral · production · bikamonki · 2015-02-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use multiple cloud providers (Digital Ocean and AWS being our primary), Play Framework, AKKA , Ansible for deployment, Shippable for our CI”
neutral · production · doppenhe · 2014-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used AWS, DO, and most recently Rackspace Cloud for a big client.”
neutral · personal · benmorris · 2014-05-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have some at DigitalOcean and some at TransIP, which is a Dutch vendor with a long track record”
neutral · production · msikkes · 2014-05-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used this (dokku on DigitalOcean as described) in production for several months for NodeJS”
neutral · production · 0.5 yr · wxm · 2013-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“provision/manage a box @ Linode or Digital Ocean”
neutral · production · eyepulp · 2013-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“not that I recall something this bad happening since I've been using Digital Ocean.”
neutral · production · exratione · 2013-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?