You will definitely have downtime due to hardware issues with AWS as well, and every other host out there... Maybe it would be better to spend the time you were going to spend switching to AWS investigating a load balancing setup and other things you would need to remove the dependency on one instance always working correctly?
The flexibility of the cloud is awesome but sometimes it does get cloudy up there. Redundancy is a must with digitalocean, aws, or anyone else.
Oh for sure, redundancy for the load-balancers, app servers, caches, and database servers are a must ... if it can fail, it will at the worst time ;-)
My point was more that the frequency at which I and others are having DO issues seems to be higher than AWS recently (I can't independently verify it until I've used AWS myself) and truth be told it's a subjective/opinionated statement. I do remember a time when AWS was extremely flaky when they first started, so I'd like to think it's merely growing pains for DO, but at the same time ... I have my own growing pains to worry about.
Can anyone recommend a very simple load-balancing setup for a bunch of tiny cloud servers serving a static app?
I'm currently using round-robin DNS for load-distribution as the simplest thing that could possibly work, but it obviously doesn't actually balance load and it doesn't remove dead servers from the pool. What's the next step up that doesn't cost and arm and a leg to implement?
Choose your favorite provider's load balancer service and add all the machines. Configure the health check to listen for a 200 on /. This will leave you with a SPOF at the LB, but you can round-robin DNS between two LBs on different providers if you wanted to.
The flexibility of the cloud is awesome but sometimes it does get cloudy up there. Redundancy is a must with digitalocean, aws, or anyone else.