The SSDs on digitalocean sold me. Another neat thing is that they have the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE etc. Compared to virpus, this is huge, because even though virpus’ images are all about LTS/stable releases, they were a few releases behind . On a different note, Ubuntu LTS releases sound like pun to me: Life’s Too Short – what the hell are you doing clinging on to this release.
Being able to do 2 factor authentication on digitalocean took care of my recent upshot in paranoia (owing to the heartbleed). This is quite a step up from the virpus management interface. Nothing against them, but virpus gave me “too many options”, which led me to worry about all those databases that have passwords. Their images contain a copy of directadmin, which I always hated (it would just blow open your site’s administration, with zero encryption). Then, there was myvirpus.com, and again manage.virpus.com. If they can take something away, it would be to collapse everything into a single interface and stop giving directadmin for free, especially when there’s no https.
A word about Yahoo Small Business, it was a nightmare on various fronts. As much I love some of the other Yahoo products, Small Business was a huge mess. I was one of the first few customers to pilot on the SMB India project, and FWIW, installing and running wordpress was such a big deal that fryol.net featured as an example for customers. I could still not do quite a few things (like slug permalinks), and it was pretty frustrating to run anything that was based off of Perl. If you’ve worked at Yahoo ever, you’ll see what an irony that last statement is.