Freelance means more control over when you work and what you work on, but it also means more effort to find work, keep your finances in order, and ensure that you are meeting the demands of your clients (who maybe sympathetic to your situation to start with, but that might change if you fail to meet deadlines).
Existing in a team environment, with hopefully support and compassion, may be better for you while your recover, and you'll gain professional insights you don't get when working by yourself.
I'm _really_ disappointed with the managed DB service. The "75 simultaneous connections per gigabyte of usable memory" limitation means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.
We (a small 5-7 person digital agency juggling multiple active projects) have been using Clubhouse for the last couple of years after outgrowing Trello and finding Jira too complex.
It's flexible, fast, good app integration and has a responsive support team. We recommend it.
Future wish list would be:
- Per Project User access, so we could invite clients into just their project.
- Harvest (or similar) time tracking integration, so we can see how long we spent on "stories"
I'm based in London, so dropped it off with https://www.ismash.com/ in St Pancras. Was done in half an hour and cost £40. Can't vouch for the quality of the battery yet, but they are a pretty big chain now so I'm assuming it won't be awful.
However I've had batteries replaced (different phones) at the Apple Store before and it took about an hour.
I use DO for several one or two box production sites (LEMP and RoR stacks), and have minimal complaints. I'm a big fan of scaling up the CPU without having to also increase HD size (which is a Linode requirement).
The biggest issue we've faced was their use of Google DNS. A couple of months back, Google DNS had an outage, and all our calls to external services semi-silently failed. Because this wasn't technically a DO service outage, it wasn't reported by them, and because we didn't know they used Google DNS we didn't trace the issue to the outage. We could have done more, but they could have also been more transparent.
Overall, we are starting to move more projects to DO from Linode, because I feel Linode's previously excellent support has slipped dramatically (customer for at least eight years). We also leverage a lot of AWS services (particularly S3 and SES).
Laptop speakers: Nope.
High Quality Headphones: Maybe.
Loud sound system in a crowded club: Definitely.
Also just because one track sounds acceptable at 192, doesn't mean another will. The only way to make sure tracks have the same 'opportunity' to sound good is to throw away less information.
Paired with caching/static frontend, it's more than enough to power small to medium traffic sites.