It is very interesting to see how DO is expanding its portfolio slowly and steadily. Does anybody have a relatively large-scale (>50k users) mildly mission-critical applications running on DO? Can you share you experience with existing services?
Cheaper, definitely self-hosted, but as with everything, you get what you pay for, you'll have to take care of fail-over and backups on your own.
Start with a small instance on DO, enable backups (for a small fee DO will create weekly backups of your instance), as your project grows, tune PgSQL and resize the instance up, add a slave, weekly backups of the instance might not be enough at this point, so also pg_dump the database at a more frequent time interval (1/day), send the backup to 1 or 2 offsite stores (S3/other remote server/etc).
Managed, comes with it's own problems as well, but at least you can blame someone else when it breaks :).
We have such an application running on DO, 100k visitors users a month. We have a big application server running and other servers for DB (postgres and redis) and static files (which is basically a nginx mirror).
So far, we are satisfied. Over the last year, there were 4 out times which lasted 30min to 1h caused by DO, which is alright I guess.
Since we experience more traffic peaks in the last time, we may use their load balancers in the future. The application servers are not the problem though, more the DB server. This is more a pain, since setting up and maintaining a DB cluster is quite a lot of work. We might go to AWS for this.
TL;DR DO works for larger projects, databases are bit of a pain though
Yeah the load balancer was just intended for the application servers. Running a hot DB secondary with just read accesses is possible by setting up manually, but tends to require a lot of maintenance work during updates in our experience.
To be honest, we have not figured out how to connect the DO servers to AWS yet. Do you have experience with that?
Having a cross-datacenter VPN is one way. But I am not sure about how bad your latencies will end up. Most likely they won't be performant especially in the case of an ACID compliant DB.
We outsourced our database to Google Cloud after having pains with percona on DO with clustering. Might be worth looking at that. No regrets for us so far, except that restoring backups is painful if you want 1 out of many databases restored.
