As the CTO of an Ad Tech startup which is currently disrupting the broadcast and broadband marketing industry, I truly appreciate how ScaleGrid is helping us rapidly grow and scale our cutting edge platform (advocado.media). ScaleGrid streamlines the MongoDB dev ops and allows us to focus on building out the business critical features that are driving the growth of our platform.

The ease of use was fantastic! The dev ops that goes into setting up scalable and redundant MongoDB clusters in Microsoft Azure is fairly daunting, but ScaleGrid automates 95% of that! They also make it very easy to switch from Azure to AWS, an initiative of ours which is currently underway. We are also currently implementing a sharding solution for improved horizontal scalability and ScaleGrid has made that process much easier to manage as well.

There is not much to not like about ScaleGrid. My biggest complaint is the lack of multi user account with groups and access controls, this forces us to use a single login to manage our ScaleGrid instances, which is not ideal. I think the monitoring metrics are in a pretty good place now but could be improved to be more on par with what you get from a more mature platform like AWS RDS for example.

Exceptional product and exceptional customer service.

Although I could have spun up yet another database in Azure or AWS, I found during the proof of concept stage that even though it is an Azure or AWS solution that ScaleGrid is managing, the throughput and reliability is much higher. In fact, it is because ScaleGrid effectively manage the instance for us that I decided to let them take the hassle.

It is slightly more expensive than going direct but the value add of being fully managed and pre-configured was worth the additional spend.

A basic droplet on DigitalOcean/Linode cost $5, while ScaleGrid is at $10, which is fine because they provide Dbaas. However scaling upwards becomes increasingly expensive. DO Droplet Original Price. / ScaleGrid Price $5 | $10 $10 | $35 $20 | $80 With the price difference, you are better off using MongoDB Cloud Manager, at $35/server agent. Spoke to ScaleGrid support, and they said they price this way because that's how DigitalOcean Managed Databases are priced, which I find it quite a laugh. DigitalOcean, as the service provider, also provides the SLA, and automatic failover, while ScaleGrid is basically just... a web interface. Conclusion: Just overly expensive for the service it's providing.

I'm using MongoDB and it's easy to spin up a database, though it takes about 20 minutes to complete the set up. Backup services etc seems ideal, with different frequency settings. Automatic replica and sharded cluster set ups (though I've never tried).

Expensive, just expensive. Slow - Spinning up server takes a long time (20-30 minutes). Updating takes a long time. Migration also takes a long time. They claimed they use encryption at rest, while that is only available in MongoDB Enterprise version. They are not using enterprise version.

We previously used mlab for our hosted MongoDB needs, but they shut down. Out of all competitors ScaleGrid stood out to us because of their fair pricing and simple setup.

We would have liked to have our test/staging environment on a different cluster. This would double our costs though. Mlab offered free environments for testing. They had very small data allowance, but it was perfect for us. We now had to opt into having our test database live on the same cluster. It's okay, but that could be improved. Accessing backups is also cumbersome. Often I just need to look up something that for instance got deleted by accident. These are small issues and definitely not a deal breaker.

So far no issues.=

Setup a production Mongo database in less than a few hours. I had a few questions for the support team and they were quick to respond.

It wasn't clear to me about which nodes I should setup the replica set. Support helped me with this.