I have recently started using Digital Ocean for hosting. I was previously using the free Heroku hosting, which I liked very much. The DNS was a bit tricky to set up, but once it got configured, it was smooth. I was able to get a one second load time for the archetyp.al index. It’s all static files, but I was still happy with Heroku, especially for free. However, I’ve been diving much deeper into web development lately, and I’ve decided I need a larger base of operations on the web, and Digital Ocean was at the top of my short list of candidates (along with dreamhost and linode). The SSD’s on every machine is what finally sold me.
I’ve been working on a rails project lately, and I need a dev machine on the cloud for testing purposes. So I found myself needing to set up a rails environment on my new Digital Ocean instance. I naturally went with my friend chris’s excellent blog on setting up rails for Ubuntu 12.10 with NginX, etc. I decided to go with MySQL instead of postgres.