DigitalOcean App Platform - thoughts?
Came across this announcement today: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps/
Definitely intrigued to see a PaaS offering from DO - I'm in the beginnings of a project right now, and I might give it a whirl to see how it goes. Though, given that DO is known for simple and predictable pricing, the pricing for this service is not immediately clear to me - but to be fair I haven't dove much in yet.
Curious on people's thoughts here!
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Still unsure why it’d be better for PHP than simply using Forge plus their droplets...
Tbf PHP is probably one of the easier languages to set up but still. And with Forge it’s a single monthly payment for unlimited sites/servers and everything.
Seems very overpriced to me. You can install Dokku on a DO droplet and host as many apps as you like. In other words, seems like theres a premium to get automatic app creation and management but it wouldn't be worth it to me
Or indeed piku!
It looks interesting, the pricing is for sure much cheaper than Heroku, $12/month for the same thing you pay $50/month for at Heroku.
Depending on how much you spend on the database, it could be cheaper than render.com
Yeah, definitely DO and render are more comparable in price - it's interesting to compare the two feature-wise as well, which seem broadly similar. But it's a little disappointing to see that DO doesn't seem to have anything like automatic/ephemeral PR previews/environments. (Unless I missed that?)
I've never noticed that feature in Heroku or Render before but I just took a look at how Render does that, and that is really cool to be able to easily spin up a pull request and test it out before merging. Hopefully it's in Digital Oceans roadmap.
I have just tried it, and it seems it is actually building on Heroku? This is the message I got after my first tryout:
Not sure whether they are just using their buildpacks or even the infrastructure. It feels like stacking cards, the closer to the ground you are, the lower the risks.
They are not building on Heroku, your logs are referring to https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python
I have been using Captain Rover to build my own PaaS on Digital Ocean. Works well with a simple but powerful interface.
I just hosted a small static site and it works really well.
The only problem it's that Root Domains are not supported.
"Root domains are not yet supported"
Good to know that DO is now a PaaS and IaaS ! I will definitely give it a try when they release the upcoming features ( like gitlab integration)
Would love to get your thoughts here after you give it a try.
They talk more about pricing for it on their pricing page. For example, the basic tier has 3 options under it: $5/mo (512mb ram), $10/mo (1gb ram), and $20 (2gb ram). I think that's where the "Starting at" comes from.
Have I understood correctly that I will need a DO droplet (c. $5/mo) plus an additional $5/mo for the basic PaaS offering?
You would use the PaaS offering instead of the droplet, I believe. With traditional droplets, you get an instance that you setup yourself, whereas with the PaaS offering, you still get an instance but its configured and managed for you.
Yup, makes sense - I took some time to read into the pricing, and it's not really as obscure as I had initially thought.
The pricing seems a bit confusing, but I think it means that price + additional charges for the instances / database. Prices appear to scale linearly.
Looks very promising. The basic plan seems like a replacement for Heroku & the starter for Netlify.
We use DO droplets for some services and I hate the setup & maintenance. So we've apps divided between DO, Heroku & Netlify right now. If I had the choice earlier, would have just used this app platform instead.
I've been using DigitalOcean for ages now and I've had no major problems. Their tutorials are simply amazing and their support team is super decent for an unmanaged service provider unlike AWS for example.
Just found that maybe it's based on Nanobox
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitalocean-acquires-nanobox/
I am working on https://Appliku.com/ for almost 2 years, which is basically PaaS on top of DO and AWS.
It uses droplets to deploy your apps, so pricing is predictable and fixed monthly fee by number of servers.
First I thought Do PaaS is a competition for Appliku, but then realized that with their pricing it is yet another Heroku.
This PaaS is really expensive. Again.
I invite you to give Appliku a try, let me know what you think.
Thanks!
Appliku seems cool! Thanks for sharing
Thanks, sorry just noticed the comment.
Let me know if you need any help.
Anyone have a PaaS 101 article?
I was excited at first, but in the end, for my case, it seems still easier to create a new droplet using their marketplace images + cloud-init.
It's expensive! Starts out double the price of a normal droplet, and scales up to about 4x a normal droplet price, while providing less CPU power / disk storage / bandwidth.
Going from 1 virtual CPU to 2 virtual CPUs was a jump from $5/mo to $150/mo.
I mentioned about this in a couple of their launch threads, and they added a plan in the middle to try and address this -- so now it's $50/mo (vs. $15 for a similarly-sized droplet). Larger instances are $300 for 4 virtual CPUs (where a normal droplet would be $40).
Setting up from a web dashboard and automatically deploying every push to GitHub is nice. But, for an IndieHacker, Dokku on DigitalOcean is robust, easy, and cheap.
Very cool, a lot of players in this space now. I guess I'm happy about that, just use the one you have the most experience with. :)
I'm quite excited for this. I use DO for pretty much all of my projects.
I use their managed DB, domains, Spaces, CDN and droplets. This was the next piece of the puzzle and I think the price is more than fair. It already beats render.com and Heroku
Personally, I've never had outages or bugs caused by them.
Overall, very keen to start using this service!
I have a marketing site for an almost done SaaS running on AWS with lambda and RDS and its absolutely brilliant in speed, security and reliability. But I'd love to host it all on a smaller platform like DO which has enough managed services to get the job done. This new app platform is super intriguing.
But I have been reading all sorts of recent reviews and forum posts with countless nightmare stories of them just randomly shutting off servers, locking accounts with no notification, and taking days and weeks to respond to tickets. That could literally end your business.
I wish there was a solid alternative US based provider with a set of basic managed services (Vpc, mamaged dB, etc) to AWS, GCP and Azure. I've had good luck with Linode for basic VPS needs, but they are behind in their managed services for now. I wish there was another solid alternative.
Stick with the IaaS...
Way better bang for your buck.
Also more control in terms of the server configuration.
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I had been using DO for 4-5 years now and my droplets never went down, are people encountering more frequent outages with DO than other hosting providers?
Agreed! They broke their hypervisor one day and refused to help me out! My VPS was down and they continued to claim that everything was fine at their end. In the end, I had to create a backup using their snapshot tool and create a new VPS using it. I then started using Vultr.com, no outages!
This. DO is cheap, but it has its moments, not the good kind.
These outages had me hunting for bugs that don't exist, when it's really just them.
Have used it for years and it's been super reliable.