DigitalOcean vs LiquidWeb

Prosperous

Thanks guys.

Is there anyone else with some hands on experience that can shed some light for me please?

luceos

Prosperous what additional information do you require?

Prosperous

I guess just more posts on experiences people may have had with each. I haven't made a decision as of yet but I am slightly leaning towards one over the other. This topic has helped.

luceos

I think the question you have to ask yourself is:

Do I want my hosting to be managed or not.

And that is something you have to decide on your own.

Prosperous

If you put it like that, I may have made my decision.

I am going to stick with LiquidWeb purely due to the fact that I don't have the time or money at the moment to invest into hosting. LiquidWeb are the balance between both factors; I may pay more than DigitalOcean but administratively and server-side I save in time. As I mentioned in my first post, certain circumstances have come up and I need to concentrate on them over a hobby. LiquidWeb have treated me perfectly and I hope to continue growing that bond. Their support team is second to none and issues have been resolved each and every time I have asked for assistance without delay or inconvenience. Thanks for your input guys.

This doesn't mean my presence here or at FluxBB will change of course and I'll still have my personal projects going, just not on the scale I planned them for that's all. ?

Dakoom

You know my idea here, Liberty. I personally never tried DO as I'm not a server admin. And if I were you, in this case, even if the cost is more, I also would have chosen LiquidWeb. I can imagine myself spending hours and hours trying to learn how to upgrade a software on the server, trying to fix something... spending more money for a backup plan that in my case would be really required, etc. and I sincerely don't like this idea. Yes, would be really cool to learn new things, but as far as I'm not a real lover of "server administration" I would prefer to pass this one to people who know what they're doing (the LW staff, in this case) and concentrate by myself on something else like eg. content creation.

Prosperous

Dakoom Thank you for my feedback. This further concretes the fact that I've made the right decision. ?

Thanks Dakoom.

Kulga

Prosperous The VPS I have now is US$60 (~A$80) per month which is money I can put away to increase my savings.
...
I do know my way around the majority of hosting however I do still prefer to keep this new package easy from an administrative perspective.

When you use managed hosting, you are paying for skill and hardware. Skill to setup, maintain, debug, support, etc - and the amount of hardware (Disk size, Ram, Cpu).
If you want to pay less, you must sacrifice one of the two.

Check your long term projections. Do you plan on having this hosting for 6 months? A year? 5 years?
At $79/month + 5 years = $4740
At $20/month + 5 years = $1200

Check your usage. Do you really need a VPS, or can you use shared hosting? Do you really need 2gb of ram, or can you get by on 512M?

Check your level of support, do you really need fully managed servers? Could you setup this on your own?

My suggestion - don't change anything and continue using LiquidWeb since it's already working. But trial DigitalOceans VPS and see how far you get. If it's too difficult and overwhelming, destroy the VPS. A week with the 1gb one would be $2.50. Minimally ventured, minimal lost.
But if it's not too difficult, you're not really on your own. This is linux - any problem you have is likely documented and has a guide to it, a few searches away.

luceos

Kulga But if it's not too difficult, you're not really on your own. This is linux - any problem you have is likely documented and has a guide to it, a few searches away.

I disagree. You cannot run production environments (websites) on unmanaged (virtual) machines if you do not spend the time to keep them managed yourself. This includes reading security news, updating your machine, checking the monitoring utilities. And this excludes all basic knowledge that you should have; delisting from blacklists, how to configure your vhosts to prevent SSL vulnerabilities etc etc etc... ?

Much has been said on this luckily and I have no doubt the thread already has become quite the read-through for people thinking about the same move from managed to unmanaged.

Prosperous

Fantastic post @Kulga!

I am going to stick with LiquidWeb on a shared hosting package. I don't pay much at all per month and I managed to get the cheapest package before it was removed from the website the following morning. Their support team have been amazing and I am actually in the process of migrating the few websites I will be managing myself on this new shared account. There are no limits except for the resource limit which I don't think I'll even come close to hitting anyway.

I shall keep you guys updated. This topic definitely will help anyone caught in the same situation as I am or merely testing the waters between managed and unmanaged hosting.

CharlesMontgomery

I am most likely about to switch to Liquid Web after running on Digital Ocean for a year plus with 80 websites or so. I just recently found out I can't add an IP to an existing droplet, for instance for a website that I want to have its own IP - I literally have to spin up a SECOND DROPLET just to accomplish that feat. No bueno.

Digital Ocean has been a GOOD experience though, I did what it took to succeed.

I hired MyCPAdmin.com to HELP manage the server - the problem with that service is that it isn't a management service, it's more of a break-fix or ticket request service - so they are NOT PROACTIVE.

Because of that I had to hire a SEPARATE System Admin because I am not one myself.

I also had to license cPanel/WHM to install on the server as well as additional software.

IMO you are far better served to work within a managed solution, ie Liquid Web. By switching to Liquid Web I will pay a bit more but I will be able to let go of my licensing, sysadmin service and sysadmin personnel - as well as a massive amount of FEAR that something could go wrong at any time. I like the post above...

On
Your
Own

LOL

Hope that helps

Prosperous

CharlesMontgomery I've been with Liquid Web since last posting in this topic.

My experience has been flawless. Any time I contact their support team they surpass the expected efficiency time and time again which is promising and makes me stick around with the service. I have had no issues since and everything just works; that's practically everything in a nutshell. I managed to get a Shared hosting account in the last hour before they took those products down too!

Do you mind if I asked whether you have signed up to the service yet? It would be awesome if you used my affiliate link. ?

Kulga

CharlesMontgomery I am most likely about to switch to Liquid Web after running on Digital Ocean for a year plus with 80 websites or so. I just recently found out I can't add an IP to an existing droplet, for instance for a website that I want to have its own IP - I literally have to spin up a SECOND DROPLET just to accomplish that feat. No bueno.

Just focusing on that, it looks like deliberate planning due to ipv4 exhaustion.

From digital ocean forum post

Hi xxxxxx, Thanks for writing in! Unfortunately this is has absolutely nothing to do with us trying to sell more droplets and everything to do with limited IPv4 IP space.
APNIC is completely out of IPv4 space, RIPE ran out earlier this year, and ARIN will be out within the next 6-12 months. Latin America will be out of IP space in about 12 months.
Internet standards have been modified over time to avoid the necessity of having a single IP per service and that led to allowing multiple virtualhosts on a single IP and now almost every modern browser even supports multiple SSL certs on a single IP.
With any commodity where there is a limited supply when the supply runs out this creates a market for that commodity. While we do pay fees to the governing bodies for any IPs that we are allocated these fees pale in comparison to the amount that we must spend to purchase IPs from other providers.
In our Amsterdam region our last two allocations have been purchased and each allocation has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. And unfortunately this price will only increase over time as the resource becomes more scarce.
There is effectively only one solution to this global dilemma and it is the global adoption of IPv6 however that requires everything along the network path to be upgraded and capable of fully supporting IPv6. This is a huge change and while IPv6 has been around for quite some time global adoption is in the sub 5% region. The good news is that once ARIN runs and out Latin America runs out I think the timeline for everyone updating their equipment and so forth will be expedited so we should see an exponential adoption curve of IPv6 at that point.
Welcome any replies or comments that you may have. Thanks!

Any through my own provider (Ramnode)

Extra IP addresses can be requested via support ticket in the Client Area. They are $2.50/mo. Please let us know the number of IPs you want and on what billing cycle you would like to pay for them. We also require that you submit valid justification with your request since IPv4 has run out across ARIN and RIPE. There must be a technical reason why you require more than one IP on your VPS. SSL is no longer valid justification given the widespread adoption of SNI. SEO is not valid justification.

jordanjay29

Prosperous Just a reminder not to share that affiliate link here, or unsolicited via any other Flarum-related network (e.g. Gitter). If he asks, of course, but otherwise a plain link.

clarkwinkelmann

I'm using DigitalOcean with Laravel Forge. It makes setting up new websites very easy (not only Laravel ones).

Of course there are still a lot of things I setup/manage manually, like backups and reboots.

Having Cloudflare up front also give me more confidence in the security of the server ?

I wouldn't recommend that for non-devs or non-linux-server people.

webeindustry

IPV4 was estimated to run out a few years ago and we've managed to make it this far, but it's time to switch over to IPV6. People are still making best use of the addresses we have, but the hard limit is 4.6B that simply can't change. There's now more people on the internet than IPV4 adreesses can be announced on physical networks.

tankerkiller125

webeindustry Another thing I love about IPV6 is that there are so many that ISPs are literally handing blocks of them out for free. The company I work for just got a /48 block of IPV6 addresses from our provider as part of there IPV6 rollout. Thats 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176! We don't even know what to do with that many addresses at this point. We could put like 1 Million ethernet ports on every PC in the entire company and still not run out of addresses.

jordanjay29

tankerkiller125 I really wish companies wouldn't be so frivolous with those port blocks. It may seem like we have an abundance now, but those have to last until the next architecture change, which could be many decades in the future. Squandering them now means we're going to run into the same problem down the line.

shakes head slowly Humans...

webeindustry

tankerkiller125

Nobody has a clue what to do with all that space right now. I used to get kimsufi with a /64 and put a custom kernel on it to use the whole address space, thereby removing the supposed limitation of 1 IVP4 & 1 IPV6. Made for some low-budget lab experiments before I got my purpose-built ESXi rig at the residence.

As for the estimate on human cap, Malthus might have something to say about that. We can pull resources from outside this pebble of a rock, I don't know that there's any real cap anytime soon. This whole supposed water scarcity fear-mongering is barely worth the chuckle. Too many unis made this a total non-issue with on the cheap graphene water-desalination in the last decade.

tankerkiller125

jordanjay29 Well it's estimated that the earth has a natural human cap of around 12-13Billion people. And even if we assume that each one of those people has like 200 devices we still wouldn't run out of addresses. Naturally, this doesn't include data centers however the reality is that IPV6 was designed with the far future in mind.

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