[HN Gopher] DigitalOcean S-1
___________________________________________________________________
DigitalOcean S-1
Author : marc__1
Score : 715 points
Date : 2021-02-25 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| hu3 wrote:
| edit: if you're going to downvote at least let me know why. I
| hold HN on high standards.
|
| DO is a fantastic value proposition.
|
| Reminds me when I was gathering cryptocurrency prices from
| exchanges and needed the lowest delay possible so an algorithm
| could protect me from pump-and-dumps.
|
| In my testings, a $5/month machine from Digital Ocean was the
| fastest to fetch prices from Bittrex. I got prices within 0.2
| milliseconds (yes, under 1 millisecond). It was unbeliavable.
|
| The algo failed miserably ofc. Mostly because Exchanges price API
| tend to be unstable. Often giving stale or no data.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I might have mentioned this before, but DigitalOcean's support is
| (or was, before I stopped being their customer) absolutely
| abysmal.
|
| I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired.
| I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default
| card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It
| didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.)
|
| So I tried another browser, another computer, etc. The change
| never took. Finally, I contacted their support. It took a ton of
| back and forth with people who had dubious language comprehension
| before I finally convinced them anything other than user error
| was going on... but then, instead of fixing it, they demanded I
| take a video and upload it for them to prove it was real!
|
| I did, and I paid the invoice manually. The bug was eventually
| fixed after a month or two, but it was a pain until that
| happened.
|
| I found another provider who is cheaper for the resources I need
| and has better customer service by miles. If I can't get you to
| even take my money in an easy and reliable way, I can't trust you
| to operate anything I rely on.
| oliverjudge wrote:
| Out of curiosity where did you move to?
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I moved to BuyVM, https://buyvm.net/. I had already been
| using their services for a few years, I just expanded on what
| I already had.
|
| They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a
| long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the
| owner and his small staff personally and get personal
| service. They made me a very good deal.
|
| I also know from their Discord that they have some
| conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that
| matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be
| represented in their behavior towards customers or who they
| choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel
| differently.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Not treating people differently based on their beliefs
| sounds like someone with leanings on either side, rather
| than extremists on either side.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Yeah. There are definitely people on their Discord I'd
| call extreme, but none of those people work for or speak
| for the company.
|
| I thought about it quite a bit, actually. But there is a
| line there and they haven't crossed it.
| sethammons wrote:
| My support issue was that I had a dead box and needed it to be
| available again. Their system thought it was up, but I could
| not reach it. There was no live support, just submit a ticket
| and pray. They need real-time support. I'm fine paying for it.
| Hell, bill me per minute, but I needed eyes in the issue.
| Instead of waiting for some unknown time for a support
| response, I deleted my stuff and rebuilt everything. If this
| were backing a commercial offering of mine, this would be
| unacceptable.
| wakatime wrote:
| Maybe they have support tiers? Every time I created a support
| ticket I got a response within an hour from a technical person.
| Their support responds much faster than AWS in my experiences.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| The responses were fast. They were just also nonsensical.
| mattnewton wrote:
| A small personal project of mine was flagged as compromised or
| something and taken down. Support couldn't tell me why, I
| suspect it had something to do with updating regularly through
| git? To this day I'll never know though, moved it to an aws ec2
| instance.
| rvz wrote:
| That sounds like a buy signal. I like this stock.
| unixhero wrote:
| Well it is not listed just yet! What is it a buy signal for?
| jnwatson wrote:
| That you can buy it at all is a buy signal. This is a sure
| sign of too much money chasing too few opportunities.
| jtdev wrote:
| I was really considering moving from AWS to DO until I noticed
| this: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse
|
| So anyone who's offended by content you might host on DO can
| report your site and some identity politics obsessed bureauocrat
| decides if you're cancelled or not...? The public cloud has
| turned into an Orwellian nightmare.
| riffic wrote:
| you do realize that the folks upstream to DigitalOcean, meaning
| the ISP and data centers, have their own AUP that DigitalOcean
| is required to meet in order to be their customer?
|
| Every ISP has an abuse process, this isn't very unique here.
| berniemadoff69 wrote:
| If you are worried about 'offending people', moving away from
| AWS sounds like a good idea. AWS's 'Acceptable Use Policy' [0]
| states: You may not use [...] the Services [...] to [...]
| display [...] content that is [...] offensive.
|
| However, moving to D.O. is a bad idea, because they have
| virtually the same policies. They can pull the plug if they
| want to, because it's their service.
|
| [0] https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
| 1f60c wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > Report abuse:
|
| >
|
| > - DMCA Takedown
|
| > - Trademark Infringement
|
| > - Spam
|
| > - Phishing
|
| > - Malware
|
| > - Botnet
|
| > - Intrusion/exploit attempts (Bruteforce, Scans etc)
|
| > - Child Abuse
|
| > - Violent Threats and Harassment
|
| > - Other
|
| That seems like a reasonable list of stuff I wouldn't want to
| have my platform be used for, either. Though, one might
| reasonably take issue with that "Other" category, but note that
| --at least in the US--web hosts cannot be forced to host any
| content they don't want to.
| jtdev wrote:
| I think you're downplaying the "Other" category, which
| literally gives DO carte blanche in cancelling those they
| don't approve of, or worse who the mob pressures DO to
| cancel.
|
| Do you not see how problematic this is? I agree with all of
| the other categories wholeheartedly, but even then,
| application of the policies of these organizations should be
| uniform, i.e., if both right wing and left wing websites
| publishes "Violent Threats and Harrassment", both should be
| taken down. That's not what we're seeing in practice from the
| major cloud providers.
| 1f60c wrote:
| > Do you not see how problematic this is?
|
| Their platform, their rules.
| jtdev wrote:
| "Their platform" has become the public square. If you
| think allowing unfettered control of such a utility by a
| small number of mega corporations - with political biases
| that change to suit their bottom line - is a good thing
| then I'm not sure we're on the same page, in the same
| book, on the same planet.
| utahcon wrote:
| Have been a user and fan of DO for years. Their product offering
| doesn't grow as fast as some cloud providers, but they are still
| my favorite for just about everything.
| alfg wrote:
| Thank you Digital Ocean! I've been a customer since the early
| days and had just a few problems, but they were quick to answer
| and address. I love the simplicity of their platform and will
| continue to use their services!
| dbyrd wrote:
| I used to work at DigitalOcean. Can confirm we didn't think a lot
| about Linode. We saw AWS as the real competitor. If there was
| someone in the VPS market we respected and tried to emulate it
| would have been OVH, not Linode.
| yannoninator wrote:
| What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use
| the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure.
|
| I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with
| the big players long term, especially in production.
|
| Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company,
| like Slack with Salesforce.
| tyingq wrote:
| For many use cases, the included free bandwidth and no _" oops
| I just spent a lot more than I intended to"_ features make DO
| vastly superior to AWS/GCP/Azure.
| syshum wrote:
| The offerings of DO and others are simpliar
|
| That is the target, AWS you need a math degree to understand
| the billing and even then you will never know exactly what you
| will be billed until you are actually billed...
|
| This is not the case with DO and Linode
|
| Sure for a large enterprise that needs that complexity and
| flexiblity to squeeze every penny out it would not be a good
| fit
|
| but for SMB work loads, it is great
| jsight wrote:
| It seems to me that these services are much more cost effective
| than AWS.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| They're not...
|
| Look at the pricing between DO Droplets and AWS Lightsail
| instances for example
| cashewchoo wrote:
| This. DO, imo, crushes AWS's pricing, documentation and ease
| of use for anyone but big enterprises. I used their managed
| k8s for a personal project as someone who's never used k8s
| before and it:
|
| * didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just
| worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far
|
| If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large
| business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money
| (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.
| RKearney wrote:
| How do you figure?
|
| $10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB
| of bandwidth.
|
| $10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB
| SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.
| jsight wrote:
| Oh, thanks, I was not aware of Lightsail at all. It seems
| like this brings them much closer to being a competitive
| offering.
| cashewchoo wrote:
| Their VPS pricing is competitive but pretty much
| everything else isn't. Specifically, I'm looking at EKS
| vs DO managed k8s, block storage for VPS's, and so on.
| RKearney wrote:
| DO charges $0.10/GB per month for block storage, the same
| as AWS Lightsail charges for block storage. AWS also has
| Lightsail Containers which are far cheaper than EKS and
| is their DO/Linode/etc equivalent.
|
| Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared
| to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month.
|
| DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD
|
| AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD
|
| I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else
| isn't" with respect to their offerings.
| nickjj wrote:
| > How do you figure?
|
| The last time I checked Lightsail uses similar CPU
| credits[0] as their t2 ec2 instances.
|
| As long as you're only using a tiny portion of your CPU
| it's fine but if you start doing work on your instance
| where your CPU is being used for a sustained amount of
| time then you run out of CPU credits and performance is
| drastically degraded.
|
| DigitalOcean has no such mechanism. I've never had a
| droplet's CPU performance get penalized because I used
| the allocated resources that I was paying for.
|
| [0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/
| burstabl...
| ec109685 wrote:
| Yeah, your right: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/
| coder543 wrote:
| I haven't really touched Lightsail in years, but this
| page shows a really nice graph that helps you understand
| your instance's CPU usage: https://lightsail.aws.amazon.c
| om/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amaz...
|
| From what I've seen of benchmarks online, DO's droplets
| have better sustained (and often overall) performance
| than Lightsail, and this looks to be the reason why.
|
| (Which isn't to say people should avoid Lightsail, but I
| don't think Lightsail is the _obvious_ 1:1 replacement
| for DO that a couple of people in this thread want it to
| be. Lightsail intentionally restricts various things to
| avoid cannibalizing their normal AWS sales.)
| JonoBB wrote:
| The performance of that DO droplet will be far in excess
| of Lightsail.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I'd argue that the billing is much more straightforward.
|
| For example, you just pay $5 for a monthly droplet. AWS
| offers a near competitor to this,AWS light sail.
|
| Digitalocean is easier to use, but only marginally. I
| strongly suspect many users who find AWS to be a confusing
| mess try DO instead. I used DO for a long time , but I've
| since switched to AWS
| pmorici wrote:
| Simpler and less complex?
| yannoninator wrote:
| They currently have an incident with their droplets right now
| at the time of writing, hardly reliable.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Remember when an AWS outage a few months ago took down like
| half the Internet?
| FDSGSG wrote:
| Yeah, but nobody is going to blame you when half of the
| internet is down.
| BasedInfra wrote:
| The pie is big enough and also don't think big cloud players
| and DO are after the same customers.
|
| 34% of the web still runs on Wordpress. A lot want somewhere
| cheap and easy to use with more power than shared hosting.
| yannoninator wrote:
| AWS LightSail is basically DigitalOcean with a huge jetpack
| with the ability to extend into AWS's ecosystem.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| You on the AWS Social Media Team or something? People don't
| want to do business with Amazon.
| ksec wrote:
| LightSail is really really slow. You will have to pay
| double to get similar CPU performance to DO.
|
| But I guess that is the price you pay for being AWS ready.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| More transparent pricing, faster iteration cycle on new
| features, easy-to-use cloud UI, developer tooling, etc
| rmorey wrote:
| I think the value prop is simplicity and customer service.
| DO/Linode/Vultr offer a way simplified product that's perfect
| for the long tail of users that don't need all the more
| advanced aws/gcp features. Plenty of great businesses are
| already being run on these smaller platforms. And you just have
| to read one of the GCP account horror stories on here to get
| the opportunity for better customer service for SMB customers
| lbotos wrote:
| for some of us, it's a desire to _not_ give Google, Amazon, or
| Microsoft any money.
|
| The big clouds offer great features, but My 5/mo Linode is fine
| to run a 3 user matrix server.
|
| (I used to work at Linode, but that didn't sway my desire to
| avoid the big 3.)
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Oh hey cool to see you in here! Thanks for referring me all
| those years ago - I'm still there! :)
| tw04 wrote:
| Do you think Kia or Toyota (the brand, not the company) have a
| long term play, or is everyone going to shift to Lexus,
| Mercedes and BMW?
|
| Not everyone is interested in paying the exhorbitant pricing
| the big cloud providers charge, regardless of features.
|
| Now they might get acquired by the big boys and run under their
| existing brands as a low cost alternative. But the services
| aren't going away. I'm willing to bet the big guys want nothing
| to do with them though. It'll just eat into their margin.
| snarfy wrote:
| What's not strong about them? Not everybody needs or wants
| AWS's 1000+ service offerings. Managed k8s and databases are
| all most people want.
| leesalminen wrote:
| What's uptime like on DO managed databases? The primary thing
| keeping me on AWS is Aurora for MySQL. The uptime we've
| experienced is phenomenal.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The company I work for solely uses DO. It has all the things
| you might want that won't get you cloud vendor locked. Plus
| their UI is actually useable, unlike my experience with AWS.
|
| Many SV startups just end up taking their VC investment and
| handing it to AWS over a period of 18 months.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I think it mostly comes down to price (at least for me). They
| will always have to be cheaper than big cloud providers to stay
| competitive.
| leesalminen wrote:
| While I wouldn't use DO et. al. for my production environment
| (it's on AWS), I've got a handful of ancillary services that
| don't need the complexity of AWS.
|
| They're so small and inconsequential to the business that I
| don't want to spend any time thinking about the security risk
| of keeping them anywhere near production. They don't need
| access to prod data so why put them in a position where they
| could potentially allow access to it?
|
| So, for me, the easiest thing was to be put them with a
| completely different company. Don't have to worry about any
| potential issues with imitating it on AWS (via additional
| accounts, different region, etc) which are all prone to human
| failure over time.
|
| Maybe I've a bad reason, but it works for me and DO gets
| ~$50/mo from us and I've never considered switching.
| Kovah wrote:
| Easy setup and maintenance, and reliable pricing. Order a Unix
| server for $10 per month, 1TB traffic included, and you get a
| server with fixed hardware specs. If you get more customers,
| you scale the server and pay a higher price. On AWS and others:
| spin up a server that costs more in comparision to
| Digitalocean, and prepare to find costs on your bill you never
| thought you would have: traffic, permanent storage, logging,...
| eljimmy wrote:
| I've been using Linode for 7 years now and I've had very little
| downtime. Pretty reliable in my experience.
|
| Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| The point is that they aren't GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't want to
| give more money to Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos.
|
| Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who
| do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.
| nunodonato wrote:
| This. Some of us are actually disgusted with amazon and
| prefer not to do business with it. Yes, even AWS
| jwr wrote:
| I use DO because it's simple and easy. I got tired of dealing
| with AWS corporate-sized crap, all I want is to spin up several
| servers using terraform and get work done. They way you can
| automatically apply firewalling rules to server tags, for
| example, is exactly what I need.
|
| And don't even mention Azure, where I feel like in a huge maze
| of mirrors. Nothing is simple, and you waste lots of time on
| clicking and figuring things out.
|
| So yes, DO has very real value, and I'm glad they exist. The
| only roughly comparable provider I found was Vultr, which I
| like quite a bit, too.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Doing anything with those big vendors is an absolute headache,
| and requires a lot of vendor-specific knowledge/experience,
| which is expensive (and their offerings are generally expensive
| and/or harder to estimate pricing on).
|
| DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable
| audience of users who do not need the complexities that those
| larger vendors offer.
|
| I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an existing
| ubuntu image on Azure in 2018. Documentation sucked - both what
| was there and discoverability. Their instructions just...
| didn't work, the UI was incredibly .... Azure wasn't my choice
| - client had O365 and their 'IT vendor' had 'credits' on Azure,
| so... I had to go with Azure... and it was a huge time sink to
| do some basic stuff that is literally a few clicks with DO and
| Linode.
|
| Yes, I don't think I can create private VPNs in the cloud with
| DO - I don't need to for most projects. The level of
| functionality DO/Linode/etc provide is adequate for a lot of
| projects, and they are growing their new functionality to serve
| needs in a way that seems usable by people without needing to
| be a certified expert in BigVendorCo.
| yannoninator wrote:
| I think AWS LightSail is what you would want, also Cloud Run
| is also another option.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| AWS Lightsail is not available on Azure.
|
| And... there's nothing inherently horrible about lightsail,
| but if I've decided that's all I need, I may go with other
| companies that have that model as their main focus. If I
| decide I want more of the AWS infrastructure, I'd stay in
| AWS (or... GCP, or Azure, or whatever).
| azemetre wrote:
| I don't own a business just personal projects, but one reason
| why I prefer DO over AWS, GCP, and Azure is the billing aspect.
| With DO I just buy credits and if I go over the limit they
| cancel my services, I'm fine with that. With AWS I could rack
| up an insane bill, I'm not fine with that. Notifications about
| billing is not the same as suspending all services.
|
| This is why I like DO. If other cloud providers do have this
| please lmk because nothing makes me more nervous than having my
| personal CC on file with very little retribution as a consumer
| (I don't want to get banned from all Google services for doing
| a charge back).
| stanmancan wrote:
| Simplicity. As a solo dev I find AWS and GCP to be a nightmare.
| I do t have time to learn either interface, and not doing so is
| dangerous as not knowing the inner workings can have security
| or reliability consequences. Just look at all the exposed S3
| buckets over the years.
|
| Just picking a VPS from Amazon is an absolute nightmare. All
| the different levels, with the credit bullshit.
|
| DO I can log in, pick a VPS with the specs I need and be done
| with it. I don't need to worry about over using it and running
| out of credits and being throttled and having that to
| troubleshoot.
|
| DO has been reliable for me, affordable, and incredibly easy to
| understand and use.
| neycoda wrote:
| Public companies are when private companies have grown to the
| point that the leaders don't know what to do with it and can't
| figure out how to compete any longer.
| stephenSinniah wrote:
| From the risk factors summary:
|
| Implications of Being an Emerging Growth Company
|
| We are an "emerging growth company" as defined in the Jumpstart
| Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. We may take
| advantage of certain exemptions from various public company
| reporting requirements, including not being required to have our
| internal controls over financial reporting audited by our
| independent registered public accounting firm under Section 404
| of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
| reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation
| in our periodic reports and proxy statements and exemptions from
| the requirements of holding a non-binding advisory vote on
| executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may
| take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until
| we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is
| earlier. In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an "emerging
| growth company" can delay adopting new or revised accounting
| standards until those standards apply to private companies. We
| have elected to take advantage of certain of the reduced
| disclosure obligations in the registration statement of which
| this prospectus is a part and may elect to take advantage of
| other reduced reporting requirements in future filings. As a
| result, the information that we provide to our stockholders may
| be different than you might receive from other public reporting
| companies in which you hold equity interests.
|
| Wow, I didn't know about this. Shouldn't financial reporting
| always be transparent?
| calderarrow wrote:
| CPA here.
|
| The short answer is theoretically, yes, but in practice, it's
| not always practical to have transparent financial reporting.
|
| For context, financial reporting is a tradeoff between cost and
| effectiveness. Whenever you're reading audited financial
| statements, you're reading an accounting professional's opinion
| which would be reasonable given a certain level of constraints.
| In theory, auditors could audit every facet of an organization
| and obtain 99.99% assurance, but the financial cost of doing so
| typically doesn't make sense for the company nor shareholders.
|
| Of the reduced disclosures, the most significant is not having
| their internal controls audited. For a big company, this is a
| red flag because the financial accounts are only reasonable if
| you also have reasonable assurance that there are controls in
| place to prevent fraud and that they're working effectively.
|
| But for smaller companies where most of the ownership is
| usually owned by founder-workers, employees, or early investors
| who are monitoring it on the ground level, there aren't many
| benefits from increased reporting over internal controls
| because if they are committing fraud, they'd mostly be
| defrauding themselves! That, combined with the fact that most
| early stage companies are already resource-constrained, makes
| regulators a bit more lenient because they assume
| investors/employees know what they're getting themselves into.
|
| Now, when a company decides to go public, they need some time
| to adopt best practices and comply with broader regulations.
| That takes time, so regulators give them a few years to get the
| personnel and processes in place without penalizing them. But
| to cover their bases, they're required to make disclosures like
| above, so that early investors buying into the IPO know that
| they won't have similar levels of assurance about the
| financials for a few years.
| stephenSinniah wrote:
| Very interesting, thank you for the insight.
| paws wrote:
| Huh, that's a bit surprising. Can anyone point to examples of
| what kinds of disclosure obligations are reduced? e.g.
| liquidation multipliers?
| gen220 wrote:
| From your snippet:
|
| > We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five
| years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company,
| whichever is earlier.
|
| The definition of "emerging growth company", from
| https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC
|
| > A company qualifies as an emerging growth company if it has
| total annual gross revenues of less than $1.07 billion during
| its most recently completed fiscal year and, as of December 8,
| 2011, had not sold common equity securities under a
| registration statement. A company continues to be an emerging
| growth company for the first five fiscal years after it
| completes an IPO, unless one of the following occurs:
|
| > - its total annual gross revenues are $1.07 billion or more
|
| > - it has issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt
| in the past three years or
|
| > - it becomes a "large accelerated filer," as defined in
| Exchange Act Rule 12b-2
|
| 2020's gross revenue was 318m growing at 50-60m yoy from prior
| years. So, unless that growth is somehow compounding, the 5
| years post-IPO is the most likely outcome.
|
| The biggest implications are relaxed requirements around
| explaining executive compensation, and that financial control
| auditing (SOX-compliance) is not required.
|
| It's not necessarily a bad thing for investors, but a trade-
| off. It means the company can focus more on growth and less
| elsewhere.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| So how does one buy ipo shares? One of my resolutions for this
| year was to buy shares in companies I do business with.
| sithlord wrote:
| Be a giant investor, ie a bank. IPOs are there for banks to be
| able to buy up shares at a low price, then dump it when retail
| investors get their turn to run it up before banks sell off.
| cat199 wrote:
| another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain
| access to more wealth:
|
| https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-
| reso...
|
| 200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).
| sevencolors wrote:
| So not for us "poors" making less than that. They really
| hate retail investors
|
| _insert angry punk sentiment here_
| milkshakes wrote:
| being an accredited investor doesn't magically get you IPO
| shares. they are very scarce and almost completely
| allocated to high volume institutions (you might get lucky
| if you have a very large relationship with one such
| institution but that's harder and harder these days)
| csmiller wrote:
| I think you can just take the Series 65 and be good to go
| these days
| eklavya wrote:
| Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a
| chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of
| how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional
| investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before
| they can sell it in the market.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| all decisions in the US are driven by dollars, and the
| guidelines are usually made by those that have a lot of
| dollars. so they create circular situations to benefit
| themselves.
| sct202 wrote:
| You can sometimes buy pre-ipo shares on EquityZen or similar
| platforms if you meet certain standards. It's all very thinly
| offered though, and sometimes they bundle offers.
| Havoc wrote:
| They allocate chunks to the big brokerages and you can apply
| for a piece. Think you need to meet sophisticated investor
| criteria tho
| fersarr wrote:
| So simple and nice to use
| pqdbr wrote:
| If someone from DigitalOcean is reading this, PLEASE, we need a
| datacenter in Brazil.
| toast0 wrote:
| Brazil is _really_ expensive to operate in. A DC in Miami would
| reduce latency noticably, but should be reasonable costwise.
| gizmo wrote:
| Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it
| IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term
| digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing
| with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on
| the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of
| premium we've seen from other tech IPOs.
|
| A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in only 357m in
| rev. That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too
| low.
| lapnitnelav wrote:
| Hello, I'm the $50 / month customer.
|
| Not an internet business per say, mostly used in the context of
| processing and storing data + internal apps.
|
| Do is great value, although not the cheapest. They need to
| double down on the useful items, maybe go a bit offroad in what
| they offer, lest they might be a in rough spot.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| > That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too
| low.
|
| I vaguely remember a talk I had with an employee there was a
| time when I think the average user was paying only $20/mo,
| which at the time, I had a $250-500/mo bill depending on load.
|
| This was before they even had a load balancer product (so
| 2012-2013-ish?), and I was running a fairly unsuccessful
| managed WordPress offering that had dynamic scaling based on
| the reported metrics.
|
| The infrastructure was just a big server for MySql, and a tiny
| server for the orchestrator. Then it would use the DO API to
| spin up new servers off a snapshot, ssh into them, and run the
| setup script to point to the right Wordpress instance in the
| database, then add it to the nginx reverse proxy list for the
| domain.
|
| The whole thing could scale up or down in 30 seconds. Sure it
| isn't as fast as AWS or Azure could scale, but we were in
| control, in code, before containerizing was even really a
| thing.
| bklyn11201 wrote:
| A newsletter about SAAS called CloudedJudgement sent this in
| January:
|
| > SaaS businesses are valued on a multiple of their revenue -
| in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months.
| Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise
| Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue. In the buckets
| below I consider high growth >30% projected NTM growth, mid
| growth 15%-30% and low growth <15%
|
| So if DO is mid growth, you could use 17x as the EV / NTM
| multiple. So if 2021 revenue will be 320mm + 25% = 397mm NTM *
| 17x = 6749mm EV.
|
| Total debt is 263mm so best (rough) guess at equity market cap
| is 6749mm - 263mm debt + 100mm cash
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I wonder what the distribution of revenue per customer looks
| like. I bet (hope?) that at the low end there are a lot of
| consumers who set up a $5 droplet to tinker around for a few
| months without doing much more, and that the revenue figures
| are propped up by a small group of bigger customers spending
| much more.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I also think this distribution would be fascinating.
| nly wrote:
| $50 seems pretty good when you can get a $5 droplet.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Believe it or not, $50 is great for a "self service" company
| like this. No enterprise sales teams pushing complicated
| billing or contracts, just customers (mostly devs/startups)
| choosing what they need without endless upsells. Looking at
| churn and seeing that per-customer number go up over time is
| the real tell here.
|
| Keeping it simple is actually very hard :)
| staysaasy wrote:
| In today's frothy market, do you think that they'd only be at
| $3B? Not baiting at all, I'm curious on how you'd break this
| down as it's always an arcane art.
|
| I mainly wonder as companies like C3.ai are above a $10B market
| cap on 50% or less of DO's revenue. And C3 (just to extend the
| example) is carrying lower margin services revenue as well.
| Growth is somewhat different, granted.
| [deleted]
| Thaxll wrote:
| Because DO is not used in enterprise, there is no reasons to
| use DO at work when you can use all other cloud providers.
| heliodor wrote:
| Read through the comments. There are plenty of them stating
| what they love about DO.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I don't see why you would use DO it's vastly inferior to
| every cloud provider, the only reason people use DO is for
| the price, it's cheap compare to AWS, Google or Azure.
| heliodor wrote:
| That's okay, the comments can prove illuminating. People
| like the documentation. People like the simplicity.
| People like the UX. And more. Give the comments a read.
|
| If you value understanding how people make purchasing
| decisions, this is an opportunity to get some insight
| because as you can see, there's a lot more to it than
| what you were able to enumerate.
|
| Seems you might be a software engineer. This should
| interest you because an engineer that understand the
| business end of things is immensely more valuable than a
| heads-down coder in the majority of tech companies.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's a lot cheaper, and because it's smaller they don't
| try to lock you into their own proprietary crap like the
| big three.
|
| Cost savings + flexibility/avoiding vendor lock-in are DO
| selling points in my mind.
| Tostino wrote:
| For some workloads, it's also much faster for similar
| money.
|
| I looked into migrating my app to Azure, to get similar
| performance to what I have in DO was over 3x the monthly
| cost. Worked with Azure support to benchmark and try and
| come up with a plan to migrate, and the support rep ended
| by saying essentially "don't think we can get close to
| your current performance for near that price".
|
| It's not cut and dry.
| fasteo wrote:
| I saw this as an advantage though. They do not have whale
| customers bringing a significant % of their revenue. I see
| lower risk here
|
| "Our average revenue per customer (which we refer to as ARPU)
| has increased significantly, from $35.97 in 2018 to $40.16 in
| 2019 to $47.78 in 2020. We have no material customer
| concentration as our top 25 customers made up 11%, 10% and 9%
| of our revenue in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively."
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI
| tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates
| to their offerings.
|
| BUT:
|
| 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and
| errors out)
|
| 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS
| providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically
| without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill.
|
| 3. Their Kubernetes Control Plane scaling is obfuscated. I had to
| contact support to realize that the control plane nodes are
| somehow tied to the size of your node pool when you create the
| cluster? That's not documented anywhere and was the cause of many
| control plane timeouts.
|
| 4. No ALIAS dns record, no way to serve Spaces from an apex
| domain. (I know this is a vendor specific implementation but it's
| table stakes imo)
|
| Again, I'm a (mostly) happy DO customer and wish them the best
| but if they really want to be seen on the same level as AWS or
| GCP in terms of some parity, they need to include some of these
| QoL features.
| nerdbaggy wrote:
| Their support is also very lacking, multi thousand a month
| spend with them buy tickets still take hours. But support seems
| the hardest thing to scale especially with the number of
| tickets they get about things not their fault.
| jbrooksuk wrote:
| We had the chance to buy a support plan with DO in a previous
| job. May be worth asking if that's something they can help
| with?
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I actually think their UI is too form over function. One
| particular annoyance I had recently was with the DNS zone
| editor.
|
| It truncates both the record contents and the domain name,
| which means that if you've got a bunch of long domains with TXT
| records, telling them apart means copying the contents into a
| text editor to see the truncated text.
|
| e.g somekey._dkim.subdomaina.domain.com
| k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA
| somekey._dkim.subdomainb.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfBBBB
| somekey._dkim.subdomainc.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA
|
| getting truncated down to
| somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
| somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
| somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
|
| Compared to AWS, which is visually unappealing, but I can
| actually see my DNS records....
| quantumcd wrote:
| I agree, but I seem to recall creating/editing records much
| easier than Route53... particularly with the console
| redesign.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I agree. I think their UI is actually a little too creative
| at times. It has lots of whitespace and a single color and
| that means people will say "clean", "minimal", "modern",
| "artsy fartsy".
|
| But I agree, that with something that coins itself "the
| developer cloud" it should provide critical information
| first. It is ok to kill some whitespace or put some
| monospaced fonts in there. You aren't trying to sell me an
| iPhone, I am trying to manage a server.
|
| Route53 on AWS is what I have been using for domain
| management and I like it because it doesn't mess around with
| cute UIs. It is strictly function. Instead of form fields for
| each TTL line and host line like other sites do, you just get
| a big multi-line text box and you use spaces and line breaks
| (gasp) to create your dns listings.
| Closi wrote:
| I actually like their UI - I think Azure or AWS looks
| fairly scary to me, someone not _that_ familiar with cloud
| architecture.
| jandrese wrote:
| 5. Their IPv6 support is pants on head.
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/ipv6/
|
| Yes, you read that right, they assign a /124 if you enable
| IPv6. There is no provision for getting anything larger. All
| configuration is totally static as well. It's really incredible
| how botched the setup is, and it has been like this for
| _years_.
|
| If you're wondering if you're sharing the same /64 with an
| entire datacenter worth of droplets, the answer is of course.
| hisyn wrote:
| This -- this has me a bit frustrated and I'll eventually
| email them about it.
|
| I haven't contacted them about it but that makes sense sadly.
| So they're getting a /64 from their upstream and just sharing
| that out to everyone. This isn't IPv4, they need to make this
| right.
|
| Vultr, OTOH, gives each _HOST_ a /64. I've been doing most
| of my work on Vultr right now so I can use more than 16 IPs
| on a single host. I was/am hoping that providers would
| standardize somewhere in the middle: Every customer account
| in each datacenter gets a /64. I wouldn't mind all of my
| hosts having their own /64 to subdivide.
| jandrese wrote:
| The smallest allocation a customer should ever get with
| IPv6 is a /64. You break a lot of stuff when you go
| smaller. DigitalOcean's approach is kind of like sticking
| an entire datacenter behind a single IPv4 address.
|
| It's not like it is hard to get IPv6 address space either.
| All they have to do is ask. A VPS provider like DO can get
| a /32 easy peasy.
| mnordhoff wrote:
| DigitalOcean has /32s from ARIN and RIPE.
|
| (And a /48 from APNIC???)
|
| (Edit: And a /36, /40 and /48 from APNIC?)
| wakatime wrote:
| Nothing is perfect. We use DigitalOcean Droplets because
| they're more bang-for-buck than AWS EC2 instances, especially
| if you're doing a lot of disk IO. However, even though it's
| more expensive we use AWS S3 instead of DigitalOcean Spaces
| because it's faster, more reliable, and replicated
| automatically. I wrote about these decisions recently here:
|
| https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...
| invisiblea wrote:
| 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.
| coder543 wrote:
| > means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real'
| database droplet.
|
| This is the case for literally every managed database service
| that I'm aware of.
|
| You pay a premium for the managed aspect.
| invisiblea wrote:
| That's an entirely fair point, but frustrating that the
| connection limits are not clearer in the docs.
| coder543 wrote:
| FWIW, if you're using 75+ connections, it's probably a
| good idea to add some kind of Postgres proxy in the
| middle like pgbouncer. Postgres doesn't handle lots of
| connections well because each connection forks off its
| own full OS process, and the performance can degrade
| noticeably when you have too many connections to Postgres
| as a result.
|
| That's been my experience, at least.
| fastball wrote:
| And DO's hosted Postgres allows you to easily configure
| pgbouncer.
| fastball wrote:
| I'm very happy with the managed DB service. A few gotchas,
| but the service itself has been incredibly stable with 100%
| uptime from what I can tell.
| jiofih wrote:
| Not being on the same level of feature parity with AWS/GCP can
| be considered a feature. Not everyone wants to drown in service
| orchestration and configs
| tehbeard wrote:
| I would add the DO API being all or nothing with permissions to
| that list.
|
| Not being able to give just DNS access to a script for updating
| LE/ACME DNS challenges means it'd be a non-starter at work.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| They also have some of the best technical documentation on the
| web.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I'm sure their own documentation is good, but certainly early
| on the tutorials always seemed to be a mess. Lots of similar
| articles written by different people with different
| structures and advice, without referencing other related
| tutorials. There seemed to be very little in the way of
| editorial control, but maybe that's better now. It was a
| good, cheap content strategy for SEO, but not a genuinely
| good resource.
| dumbsecreport wrote:
| Thats because a lot of it was lifted directly from the web.
| They paid people a stupid price per article to either write
| articles or copy paste documentation online while barely
| vetting it, only taking it down when people took the time
| to send in reports to staff. I'm sure things have improved
| since then.
| vinger wrote:
| Having 5 people install slightly different varations of a
| stack provided so much value it was and still is the best
| resource when installing a new stack.
| KingFelix wrote:
| I agree, I had limited knowledge on a few things and was able
| to get it all sorted with their guides. I think they offered
| an exchange of credits for tutorials or something. My
| favorite part of their guides, the drop downs to pick your
| version. Google can give me results to a simple ubuntu
| question that is ten years old, they had the option to pick
| which version you were using to get you the correct guides.
| Brilliant
| skrtskrt wrote:
| As I started learning how to spin up and manage Linux servers
| and then deploy my own (unmanaged) k8s on them, half of my
| bookmarks are DO documentation.
| sitkack wrote:
| I hold up this part of DO as one of the single best uses of
| the amazing tech writers our industry has, under appreciated
| and under paid, to punch way above their weight in a crowded
| market.
|
| Really really well done DO!
| sjs382 wrote:
| _This_ is a major reason that I became a customer and have
| been for 8+ years.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| They really do. And it goes in tangents and details I
| wouldn't have expected. Their support is great.
| FlashBlaze wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. I wanted to setup nginx and add users in
| the sudo group and almost always their articles were the
| first to appear.
| bredren wrote:
| Content growth done right.
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Yep great SEO Strategy and raising Brand awarness. Win-win
| for people searching. Find out about how to install nginx on
| Ubuntu and then memorize that next time you need a VM you go
| that blue website with great tutorials.
| bithavoc wrote:
| 5. You can't upload a custom image and assign a Floating IP to
| the Droplet, one of the most basic of the functionality of any
| cloud.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Just double-checked my DO console -- yes you can, I have a
| droplet with both.
|
| Edit: I'm wrong, see below.
| bithavoc wrote:
| Maybe we're talking about different things, docs here[0]
|
| > You cannot assign a Floating IP to a Droplet created from
| a custom image.
|
| Edit: I wanted to double-check because this would make my
| life so much easier, but no, I still can't use Floating IP
| with Custom Images. I imported a FlatcarLinux image from a
| URL and created a droplet; once the droplet launched, I
| still see this:
|
| > Floating IP: Disabled
|
| > Public IPv6 Address: Not available with custom images.
|
| [0]https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/custom-images/
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Interesting -- checked again and what I'm using is
| actually a snapshot. Not sure why that makes a
| difference, sorry for the confusion.
| dstick wrote:
| I guess that would be a slightly laborous work around?
| Install vanilla linux, configure as needed. Save
| snapshot. Treat it as a custom image :)
| bithavoc wrote:
| Yeah, Snapshots work quite well, you can even transfer
| them between accounts and copy them between regions in
| the same account, but it's a "transfer" meant to be used
| as a migration mechanism, not distribution.
| MrSaints wrote:
| Agree on all points (and definitely, a mostly happy customer
| too).
|
| (3) was the cause of numerous production incidents for us. We
| had to contact support to have it scaled up, and sometimes
| they'd take up to 3 working days to get back to us. Happily
| paid more for AWS to get better support, and stability.
| acremades wrote:
| Here is the podcast episode where Ben and Moisey Uretsky share
| how they built DigitalOcean. Worth a listen.
|
| https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-hu...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Would be interesting to see App Platform growth numbers. Lot's of
| competition: Heroku, Netlify, Fly.io, App Engine, Cloud Run, etc.
| But they may have hit the sweet spot in terms of features and
| pricing.
| mauflows wrote:
| The missing feature for me is more cache control. It's behind
| cloudflare but not configurable. So you can't cache json for
| instance
| arcticfox wrote:
| For me, the missing feature is ability to access private
| networks.
|
| (Noting here, for the DO product manager reviewing the
| thread..!)
| Tostino wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this? Just wondering what you mean
| because I have been using private networks and haven't
| really run into many issues.
| phildougherty wrote:
| Aware of this pain. Feedback noted :)
| dartf wrote:
| I really want to love DO, but I just can't. 2 main pain points I
| had from working with it for ~3 month:
|
| 1. Spaces keys. There is no way to fine tune access rights.
| Anyone with spaces key can access any space in the organization
| and read/write to it. I trust people I work with, but there is
| always room for a mistake, so even a small chance that someone
| can accidentally nuke our production space makes me nervous.
|
| 2. Something from yesterday: we use new DO apps to deploy a
| static web app. Yesterday I started to get random 404s for some
| of the assets, so app become unusable. My colleague in Argentina
| had same issues, but for different assets. We are lucky that it
| was a staging app, but imagine it was a production app and that
| would happen over the weekend? How do you even detect that? Run
| uptime monitor form dozen different locations?
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Please add GPUs! Google cloud and AWS's interfaces are hard to
| use. I recently discovered vast.ai which is great but cheap DO
| GPUs would be more trusted/professional (even if they only had
| one option).
| trsohmers wrote:
| (Shameless self promotion): Check out Lambda's GPU cloud:
| https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud
| lvs wrote:
| Are you planning to have an option that is CPU heavy with
| 1xGPU for CPU-bound loads? Like a g4ad, g4dn type of
| configuration?
| czbond wrote:
| DOCN. Anyone know the date?
| dizzydot wrote:
| Only official word I can find is Q4 2020 or Q1 2021.
| So....soon?
| Jamieee wrote:
| I used Nanobox quite heavily before DO bought them.
|
| But was a bit surprised when I saw the below, does this mean that
| they only payed $3,544 for the company? Or is there more to it
| than that?
|
| > On April 4, 2019, the Company acquired 100% of the outstanding
| equity of Nanobox, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Nanobox"), a
| deployment and management platform provider for cloud
| infrastructure. The final purchase price for Nanobox was $3,544
| and the acquisition has been accounted for as a business
| combination.
| iav wrote:
| It's in thousands - $3.5mm
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| croh wrote:
| Big fan of DO from start. Intutive UI, cheap resources, never had
| issue with infra. And great knowledge base. But the fact I loved
| most is a straight billing. There are never surprises at end of
| month.
|
| Sadly all mistakes done by AWS are picked up by other big vendors
| like GCP,Azure. Cloud vendors are more focused on adding as many
| features as possible. Who cares about user experience ? We got
| covered by certifications.
| Graffur wrote:
| There's already a lot of positive comments in here but I'll throw
| in another one. Tried DO out recently and I like how it set up.
|
| I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored
| services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored
| services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for
| example.
|
| Nope, the biggest competition is in the same niche - Linode,
| OVH, Scaleway.
| Graffur wrote:
| Is that what you think?
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree generally, but Lightsail is just obvious hot garbage.
| The CPU throttling is crazy aggressive, and you'll see it after
| 30 minutes of use, for all but the 2 most expensive of the 7
| total plans.
|
| I don't see how they could be maintaining a decent customer
| base with that setup, but I guess marketing is powerful.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I use Lightsail mostly to dodge Route 53 fees, since it comes
| with DNS management and I have a lot of hosted zones. However
| I'm also not a business and couldn't care less about the CPU
| throttling.
| tyingq wrote:
| That's interesting. I wonder if anyone has made some sort
| of api shim/facade to automate that route 53 avoidance.
| nickjj wrote:
| I've been using DO for around 6-7 years now. Really happy with
| the services overall. I hope nothing changes after IPO'ing.
|
| The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service
| seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and
| there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of
| milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around
| for folks using Spaces. I'm looking forward to the day where
| Spaces is as good as S3 because DO's offering of Spaces includes
| not only an object store but a free CDN on top. Seems like a good
| deal for $5 bucks a month if it were dependable.
|
| It's weird because every other service I use by DO has been top
| notch.
| wakatime wrote:
| Yep, same experience with Spaces here. That's why we use Spaces
| for backups only, since it's very affordable and backups don't
| need millisecond latency.
|
| https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Should I disclose this? Well, why not?
|
| I interviewed at DO a few years ago. I don't want to share the
| details, but it was the most annoying, unprofessional and
| disorganized set of interviews that I have ever witnessed in my
| life (I did ~140-150 interviews in my life for ~25 companies).
| The best part is that I was introduced to the company by one of
| their board members.
|
| Since then I kept thinking that I really liked the product, but I
| would expect them to fail as a company.
|
| Maybe DO's IPO proves that I was wrong, or maybe that they will
| be economically successful despite what I have witnessed.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Disclose what? There's no actionable details there.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Was it just that they didn't have the usual setup of
| recruiters, coordinators etc to manage the hiring loop well?
|
| If they are less than 300 people company grown over a very slow
| pace, that's understandable.
| neom wrote:
| Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was
| on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a
| fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so
| long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building
| DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days,
| lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think
| everyone involved knew this day would come.
|
| Personally I'm really proud of the work we did, and I'm overjoyed
| to have been part of building a business that is going to be a
| public company. Thanks to the HN community for being so
| supportive over the years.
| yte14 wrote:
| The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally "this _very_
| established market needs a venture capital growth play because
| we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace". In the beginning the
| entirety of DO's offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct
| lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical
| mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did.
|
| I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I'd call
| it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker's
| fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said
| product in its wake.
| brightball wrote:
| As a happy Slicehost customer, I definitely saw Slicehost in
| every aspect of the DO approach.
| benatkin wrote:
| Some are saying that about Linode and I just don't get it.
|
| Loved Slicehost!!!
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Their approach to making VPS/Cloud offerings simple and
| approachable are really what set them apart, in my mind. I
| run all of my simple things there, because sometimes I don't
| want or need the complexity that actually managing things in
| Azure, GCloud, or AWS require.
| tyingq wrote:
| I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate
| attempt to take over the _" shared Cpanel hosting"_ market
| with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for
| change...lots of little players.
| neom wrote:
| The market was considerably too small and it would mean
| building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions
| of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20
| years" was the main north star.
| tyingq wrote:
| It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion /
| year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny,
| but it is highly fragmented.
|
| And I think the solution could be layered on top of what
| they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons,
| icons, and little apps to create web server instances and
| tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web
| file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basically
| just a consistent web app to put on top of their
| "droplet" ecosystem. Much of it already exists, so a fair
| amount of the effort would just be marketing it.
| neom wrote:
| We were too busy building in the wake of AWS. Looking
| forward and building into the paradigm shift was the
| strategy (and it seemed to work!). :)
| tyingq wrote:
| Makes sense, though paradoxically, that market is growing
| by around 10% per year.
| unilynx wrote:
| This doesn't sound right. I know we evaluated linode vs do in
| 2016, and dropped linode because of lack of volume support.
| Digitalocean had that, even if only in FRA1, but it surely
| was ahead of linode back then
|
| (Not sure if block storage came even earlier to other DO data
| centers, but as those were outside the EU they wouldn't have
| been relevant)
| grey-area wrote:
| As a user of both services for years, the only point on which
| they are similar was/is that they both offer shared cheap VMs
| (as do lots of other services).
|
| Presenting early DO as a ripoff of linode is frankly absurd,
| the UI, user experience, API, Load balancing, backups, and
| docs were all vastly superior to Linode, and it honestly felt
| like the copying was more the other way round as Linode tried
| to catch up with their UI.
| jjav wrote:
| I'm puzzled by the praises on DO UI, since in the early
| days in particular I always found it intolerably terrible.
| Far less useful than Linode UI. Nowadays it's ok, but
| Linode is still has better UI.
| neom wrote:
| Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that
| was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace.
| DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that
| market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early
| executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it
| was a way to grow the business that was already growing
| rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only
| invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In
| terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about.
| DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before
| linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.
| CerealFounder wrote:
| The real story is Ben and Moisey were running one of the
| largest hosting co's in porn and then there was a security
| problem via one of their upstream providers and it created
| a DISASTER. Thats how DO was born from what I understand.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced
| garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public
| cloud.
| codegeek wrote:
| I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times,
| it has been a horrendous experience.
| yte14 wrote:
| I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because
| the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of
| support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with
| $10 (if I recall, it's been nearly a decade) and we started
| getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences
| with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell
| me it's still a problem. We consciously didn't want to grow
| $5 fast because we didn't have capital to throw at any
| problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode,
| also knew competing to the bottom on price largely
| relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity
| status and we weren't keen to kick off such a war for
| obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back
| from outside in 2021.)
|
| Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you
| dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because
| it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours
| (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that's
| getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn't talking
| about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom
| was referenced against Linode's work to grow you to a
| position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
| I'm also not going after you for it; I'm only responding to
| fantastic product idea.
|
| It's just odd that when competitors would ask me my
| thoughts on the "Linode clone" at 2011-era conferences
| that's something that's news to you. Is that really not
| apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least
| that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode,
| thought so?
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I've been a customer of both for years -- in Linode's
| case, since 2009. Your comments are coming across like
| sour grapes, so I think this is a good opportunity to
| hear about some of Linode's mistakes from a longtime
| Linode customer.
|
| First, you guys had the customer support interface
| compromise in 2013, and the worst part about that was the
| way that it was handled by your organization. Linode
| wouldn't own up to the compromise initially, dragged
| their feet on announcing anything about it, and then
| tried to downplay it.
|
| Then there was another similar incident in 2016, and,
| amazingly, the response from Linode was nearly identical
| to 2013. No lessons learned. After that, I started seeing
| influential people on HN say things like, "don't use
| Linode". I stayed on Linode, but I also started using
| DigitalOcean after the 2013 compromise and split my
| hosted services evenly between the two of you after 2016.
|
| DigitalOcean aggressively iterated multiple aspects of
| their products in that time period. They announced block
| storage in 2016. Your customers immediately started
| asking when Linode would come out with a competing
| service, and that didn't happen until 2018. Here, it was
| Linode rushing to build a DigitalOcean feature.
|
| Linode initially focused on expanding RAM and disk space
| for your customers' instances at the same price points.
| Every year, you'd announce, "hey, we're doubling your
| RAM!" or some such thing. It was awesome, but I also
| thought at the time that you were shooting yourselves in
| the foot. How many customers looked at that and went,
| "yep, cool, now I can downsize my Linode and give them
| less money each month"? I know I did, at least a couple
| of times.
|
| Then, you chose to try to compete with DigitalOcean on
| price. As a long time Linode customer, I _never_ wanted
| that. If I want a $5 VPS, I 'll just go to DigitalOcean.
| Hell, you shouldn't even want me as a customer for $5.
| Let them deal with me instead. I wanted Linode to be the
| larger, slightly more expensive provider with the even
| better support.
|
| I've had to deal with Linode support a few times over the
| years. They've mostly been awesome and first class. I've
| never been unhappy enough with Linode to want to leave
| altogether. Both of you should be focused on eating AWS,
| not each other; showing up to a competitor's HN thread to
| complain about them being copycats is really poor form.
| ObsoleteNerd wrote:
| This just nailed just about everything I was going to
| say. I've used and liked both since both started and this
| entire thread is pretty embarrassing.
| stanmancan wrote:
| I was a huge Linode fan for years. I used them
| exclusively. DO showed up and slowly but surely started
| being the better deal. Lower entry points, better specs,
| and then finally a more robust product line. I slowly
| found myself going to DO for new servers and eventually
| moved everything there for simplicities sake.
|
| Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they
| have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.
| jamroom wrote:
| Wow - really? I use both Linode and DO extensively and
| Linode is better on almost all fronts in my experience.
| Faster servers, better network, Linode's Object Storage
| is way better than DO's "spaces" and Linode's support is
| hands down the better of the two. If you're going to
| spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless
| you're already there?
| maximus024 wrote:
| > If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you
| go with DO unless you're already there?
|
| I would go with anyone other than Linode, considering
| they left the control plane running a publicly accessible
| unpatched version of ColdFusion, which led to multiple
| instances of them losing control of customer's data.
|
| Anyone but Linode.
| jamroom wrote:
| Yeah I know about that incident - but also believe
| companies have the ability to learn from past mistakes
| and do better.
| maximus024 wrote:
| Unfortunately it wasn't a single incident.. fool me
| once..
| jjav wrote:
| I mean that was terrible, but I know full well that every
| company ever will have dumb vulnerabilities occasionally,
| so by that metric I could never use anyone.
| stanmancan wrote:
| Linodes support is great; I can't say much about DO
| because I haven't had to use them.
|
| Around the time I switched there was a lot going on. DO
| had released their $5 droplets. Linode was still stuck on
| their old, clunky UI, and the migration to the new "Cloud
| UI" wasn't executed well. Then there was a few DDOS
| attacks that took stuff down, and the multiple serious
| security vulnerabilities that they did a -horrible- job
| managing.
|
| I've been at DO for a number of years now and it's been
| solid. I have a few dozen servers and take advantage of a
| few of their services. Their Managed Databases are
| incredibly well executed.
|
| I've been happy over all so no reason to look elsewhere.
| jjav wrote:
| Same here, I use both but prefer Linode in every aspect.
| Much better support and reliability in particular.
|
| I moved a few very low-end hosts to DO when the $5 price
| point appeared but have never been overly impressed.
| Later Linode matched prices so no real reason to look
| into DO anymore.
|
| But I do still use both. Partly to avoid migrating the DO
| hosts I have but more because I just like to keep aware
| of how both are evolving.
| vinger wrote:
| Last time I provision on linode and do at the same time a
| created a ubuntu box. I found I had to setup a few
| additional things in linode. Linode never felt as
| polished which is fine.
|
| The one thing that made do better was they had a
| datacenter in my region.
|
| No one mentioned vultr killer $2.50 which is where I
| would go if I wanted a dev box to play around on.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I remember something being off in Vultr $2.50 offer which
| made me stop halfway during sign-up. Had to go to
| https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ again to
| remind myself: $2.50 VPS does not come with an IPv4
| address. At least today they openly mark it and I think 5
| years ago you'd only find it after a few clicks.
| fastball wrote:
| You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias /
| confirmation bias here.
|
| If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to
| _you_ asking about something they then couched _to you_
| as a Linode clone. That doesn 't mean it's how people
| were talking about DO when not directly speaking with
| someone at Linode.
| fourstar wrote:
| Lol. Typical HN midwit reply.
|
| Edit: lol at the child poster to this who told me to "go
| back to my hole" before editing it with the HR-approved
| reply. Didn't want to risk any precious karma eh?
|
| And yes you're right that this is "the wrong forum" --
| all the real hackers left HN years before you joined.
| jiofih wrote:
| You seem to be in the wrong forum - personal attacks are
| not welcome here.
| yte14 wrote:
| I don't understand how that impacts my point at all. If
| an opinion is only held in one context it's not actually
| held? Is that what you're saying? I'm sorry, I don't
| follow.
|
| Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even
| among competition. I'm not basing what I'm saying solely
| on the example given.
| derefr wrote:
| Perhaps it wasn't their own mental model of the landscape
| at all, but just what they considered to be the most
| expedient way of getting the message across in terms
| customers would understand.
|
| Hypothetical analogy: if I were describing my very-first-
| ever PaaS service, to competitors who'd only ever heard
| of IaaS services -- and this wasn't the _point_ of the
| conversation (i.e. I wasn't trying to sell them on the
| benefits of PaaS), but rather just a supporting statement
| to talking about how we do /don't offer an IaaS feature,
| because we're a PaaS -- then I'd probably describe my
| PaaS by analogy to some popular IaaS that has a feature-
| set closest to a PaaS.
|
| In my own mental model, _I_ have a separate node for
| "PaaS"; but if I know that the people I'm communicating
| with _don't_ -- and teaching them what a PaaS is would
| take time away from the real topic we're trying to focus
| on -- then I'm going to describe my PaaS provider as
| "basically like $foo IaaS provider" when talking about
| how it has the same feature X. To them.
| yte14 wrote:
| Again, I'm not basing what I'm saying solely on the
| conference _example_. I'm not arguing over the psychology
| of multiple conference conversations from ten years ago
| any further because it's completely immaterial to my
| point (and one example of many; the point of the example
| was that it was openly discussed among competition, not
| "let's go to the mat on what constitutes an actual
| opinion with the assumption that I don't perceive
| conversation appropriately").
| Closi wrote:
| Have you ever watched Kitchen Nightmares? Bad chef's are
| often surprised to get told their food tastes bad because
| everyone always tells them how good their food is!
|
| If you know someone is from a particular company, you
| don't badmouth the company in front of them, but you
| might badmouth the competitors.
| fastball wrote:
| Your point makes sweeping claims that "the entire
| incumbency" thought of DO as a Linode clone.
|
| Can I see your survey results from 10 years ago, or is
| this an opinion formed by a Linode employee from a
| handful of conference conversations?
| webmobdev wrote:
| As a user, I agree - DO was seen a cheaper clone of
| Linode / Slicehost when they launched. I used to usually
| recommend Pair and Linode to my clients and, later DO to
| my more cost-conscious clients. At that time, I preferred
| Linode over DO, because the support was better and the
| prevalent practice than was to look suspiciously at new
| hosts because a lot of them folded up. You looked to
| older hosts, like Pair (and later Rackspace and Linode)
| because you knew they were reliable in both tech and the
| hosting business.
| temp667 wrote:
| I loved pair! Never followed what happened to them!
| jiofih wrote:
| He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee
| might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the
| time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your
| comments.
|
| EDIT: s/general public/others
| hobs wrote:
| Well a non-DO employee (and someone who ran things on
| linode and then on DO) I would say its a fair read and
| what the mindshare at the time was.
|
| Linode had decent service but honestly the irc channel
| was pretty toxic to noobs (one of the reasons I left!)
| and finding a "cheaper linode option" was great.
|
| That might have switched quickly, but it was definitely a
| thing.
| [deleted]
| yte14 wrote:
| I wasn't talking about the general public. I was talking
| about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers,
| and that wasn't a corrected typo.
|
| Edit: I responded to something that's now been silently
| edited out and replaced with "others".
| random5634 wrote:
| I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to
| product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics
| maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing,
| what's different about the "other" guy that means they
| are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes
| linode a bit.
|
| Security:
|
| One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security
| despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency
| too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that
| was just a no go.
|
| Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks?
| Do folks remember any of this?
|
| They might have been using cold fusion or something
| because they got hacked again I think just like a year
| later?
|
| These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues -
| but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from
| linode.
|
| There was this hack here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170
|
| I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases
| etc?).
|
| ---
|
| Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as
| the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost
| more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away
| just because of the repeated lack of care around
| security.
|
| I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them -
| wow!
| jiofih wrote:
| I guess you may think of that in the same way the
| incumbents considered Amazon "another e-commerce play" or
| Google as "another search engine" while being blind to
| the real changes happening underneath.
| havelhovel wrote:
| Whether your claim is true or not, there's more to a
| product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this
| line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects
| poorly on the Linode team.
| wastedhours wrote:
| > more to a product than the underlying technology
|
| Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I
| looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both
| seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the
| product I should be using.
|
| Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling
| was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is
| well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet
| products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I don't think it reflects poorly on them at all. When DO
| started everyone still used the help document of Linode
| and Slicehost to setup and spin a server on DO. They
| could do that because DO was a clone of these services.
| To their credit DO improved and grew, and that's no mean
| feat.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes. For those of us that actually went through the
| Slicehost, Linode era, the time when paying per month and
| not per hour for a simple VPS before everything was
| rolled into the word _Cloud_. Those comment read more
| like an accurate account of history while others read it
| as an attack of a company.
| jiofih wrote:
| > it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours
|
| As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode
| was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and
| a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the
| instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their
| web UI also has always been miles ahead.
|
| The competition also didn't have SSD as an option until
| much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital
| ocean at the time.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of
| linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.
| 1shooner wrote:
| I remember at that time feeling almost bad for Linode
| because they had built up so much valuable educational
| content about what you could run on their services, and I
| was using it step-by-step on DO. The only differentiator
| was the price. Of course DO quickly replicated and
| excelled in providing that tutorial value as well.
| kchr wrote:
| But were they really doing anything other than
| copy/pasting HOWTOs by Falko Timme?
| disgrunt wrote:
| They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I
| believe.
| yte15 wrote:
| Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode
| pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the
| business and running into limitations of their first
| stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves?
| Linode was a few years old by that point. For those
| keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just
| like everyone else.
|
| Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though.
| Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good
| people.
| neom wrote:
| You do know that Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost,
| was pivotal in the DigitalOcean story also?
| yte15 wrote:
| Yes. What's your point?
| z92 wrote:
| Right! Linode was $20/month at least and more focused to
| businesses. Not the then unbelievable $5/month for SSH
| ssh accessible virtual box with root access that DO
| started. Plus the SSD. Other hosting providers later
| caught on with DO.
|
| But the thing I liked best was their "no hidden cost".
| You pay what you agreed before to pay. No surprise. No
| upsell, trick sell which were common with all hosting at
| that time.
|
| DO still maintains that honesty. Not sure what will
| happen after their IPO.
| lloeki wrote:
| > As a developer, DO never looked anything like it.
|
| The UI, the simplicity, SSDs, additional block storage...
| but also the API and its doc, as well as IPv6, regions,
| snapshots/backups, and availability. Later on, load
| balancers, object storage and k8s. All of that much
| simpler than AWS and both better thought out and more
| featureful than Linode or OVH.
|
| DO truly deserved their success.
| ksec wrote:
| DO definitely had UI, SSD first. But Block Storage,
| Regions, Snapshots Backup and Load Balancer all were
| either first on Linode or being worked on for a long
| time. Linode also had Pooled Transfer and other tidbit
| for a long time well before DO.
|
| Remember we are talking about early days of DO. Of course
| later DO innovate more and Linode had to follow. And the
| new Linode UI is arguably better than DO. Although it did
| took them _years_ to make it. The beauty of competition.
| tasogare wrote:
| I'm customer for years and I don't use any of the
| features you mentioned past the first two; I'm part of
| the 5$ VM crowd for who this is the killer feature.
| Should OVH have provided on-demand instead of yearly
| plans for VPS I would have stayed there as I've my
| domains there already.
| viro wrote:
| The simper than AWS aspect was one of the main reasons I
| choose DO to do most of my cloud stuff. Also AWS had this
| odd habit of not auto charging me so it would go a couple
| months then I would get hit with multiple months worth of
| a bill.
| riffic wrote:
| The API is a key point many people miss when they think
| of early DigitalOcean as just another VPS host.
| jjav wrote:
| > Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.
|
| I'd strongly disagree (been on DO since about 2012 and on
| Linode a few years earlier; I still use both). DO UI is
| ok these days but years ago Linode UI was far better in
| every way.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| As an original Slicehost customer, and long time Digital
| Ocean and Linode customer, your version of history is
| bullshit. I was looking to move from Rackspace after the
| Slicehost aquisition. Moved to Digital Ocean because of
| the SSD offering. It performed wonderfully. Needed bigger
| servers, and Linode had just created an offering
| competitive with Digital Ocean. I signed up and ran some
| benchmarks and Linode was about 25% faster than DO. I
| moved everything to Linode and the company has been there
| ever since. For what it is worth, my Linode bill is
| currently about $2000, and DO is $40. I am calling you
| out as a loyal Linode customer who thinks Linode is
| great.
| aantix wrote:
| "An aggressive exit strategy" when they started in "2003"?
|
| Aggressive, as in two turtles fighting.
| yte15 wrote:
| Linode was founded in 2003, not DigitalOcean.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| I was on Linode for a while and moved to DigitalOcean. At the
| time it was a very simple calculus.
|
| DigitalOcean was less established, less mature, offered fewer
| CPUs and less RAM per dollar and had only two (or was it
| three?) locations.
|
| But they had SSDs and Linode did not.
|
| The difference in Wordpress performance was night and day. So
| I switched and I'm still there. Linode dragged its feet on
| SSDs. I don't care why or how. I cared that I could get what
| I needed elsewhere.
| ryandrake wrote:
| What's the difference like today? As a long time Linode
| customer, I just never even felt the need to shop around.
| Maybe I should! It's always been just fine for my "tiny
| duty" Wordpress host. I always knew DO existed, but figured
| it's the same $5 and I'm probably getting about the same
| thing so why bother switching. I guess I'm a good example
| of why stickiness matters.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Today the pricing and services are essentially matched.
| Someone will obviously fight be on this statement, but I
| think today they are essentially equal from a cost
| perspective. They all run SSDs and have similar cost per
| RAM/CPU core.
|
| But as others have said, Linode was around forever.
| Digital Ocean came in and disrupted them. When DO first
| came on the scene then you easily could have switched and
| got more for your money. But Linode has caught up and
| matched them. Right now they are both good. I have
| actually been favoring Linode lately with their new
| interface. But I have $3,000 or so of Digital Ocean
| credit that I am trying to use up first.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I'm really happy to see Ben and Moisey get this far. They are
| both extremely competent sysadmins and system architects too.
|
| They retained a lot of equity as well - good to see.
| sneak wrote:
| My experience is that not only did they start out as
| incompetent, they actively downplayed early security issues
| and outright lied about certain aspects of their products.
|
| I found major, glaring security/architecture issues with
| their main product early on, and was told by DO staff to go
| full-disclosure because it was working as designed. When I
| did so, DO lied about the impact on their blog.
|
| Those lies are still up:
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/transparency-regarding-
| dat...
|
| > _At no time was customer data "leaked" between accounts._
|
| (I have screenshots of other DO customers' data.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097
|
| Even their outage blog post from a few months ago is now
| deleted.
|
| My experience is that DO is a shady company, and I'll not do
| any serious/critical business with them or ever use them to
| store secret information.
|
| As for the lying, I'd personally never do business with any
| of the early DO management/founders.
|
| There's no amount of money that can be used to buy a
| reputation for integrity.
| yte15 wrote:
| Your issue was exactly, and I mean exactly, what I had in
| mind when I said "learning experiences" upthread. I
| followed it closely. Linode painfully learned the scrubbing
| lesson as well - and DO was in a worse position to learn it
| at the time, being forced to throw the scrub write load at
| SSDs that don't like that type of load. That's the real
| issue, honestly, that they probably started noticing SMART
| warnings from scrubbing by default on SSDs (particularly
| for cheap instances that turn over often), and took the
| venture capital approach of taping over it to make the next
| round by making it opt in.
|
| It's a tough problem to deal with and not something you're
| likely to think of designing such a product from first
| principles. That's not an indictment, it's just fundamental
| to experience gained doing this stuff (and it's perilous to
| get wrong). Filtering unsolicited ARP to prevent domUs from
| hijacking default gateways was another lesson in blood, and
| one of the first things we tried within five minutes when
| we did competitive on DO around launch time (they hadn't
| thought of it; it worked).
| sneak wrote:
| It's not tough to solve.
|
| The whole scrub thing was a red herring: you don't need
| to scrub anything to not leak data, you just thin
| provision. It's (mostly) fine if customer data stays on
| your disks after they delete. It's not fine to give it to
| the next customer because you don't know how disk
| abstraction works.
|
| My issue is mainly how they coped with it, which has
| nothing to do with their (at the time) technical
| incompetence: they simply lied about the effects.
|
| Competent or not, lying on your corporate blog isn't a
| good choice. It doesn't take any special skills or
| training to be honest on your journey from incompetence
| to competence, all it takes is integrity.
| yte15 wrote:
| Yeah. Agreed. I unfairly walked back solve to "deal with"
| on you simply from knowing the considerations that go
| into bursts of write load every time a customer clicks
| "delete".
|
| At the time Linode had a host-side scrub daemon that
| simply ate LVs as customers deleted. It's technically
| simple, but drive longevity and capacity on the host (the
| user is probably recreating their VM, for example) is
| where it gets tricky. External considerations. In the end
| scrubbing is basically killing a few dozen inodes of user
| data, but the architecture in VPS usually requires you to
| nuke the whole image, including what is ultimately the
| host's 59th copy of Ubuntu. Just managing the iops
| without annoying neighboring customers is a challenge.
|
| To my cloning point I made at the top of the thread,
| Linode was certainly no stranger to the reality
| distortion field when it suited, and I think that's yet
| another thing DO copied. That vertical is closer to B2C
| since you're usually dealing with individuals, not sales
| teams, and glossing over stuff is a bit easier than when
| your counterparty has a better engineering team than you.
| joering2 wrote:
| I second that. Over last 6 years I happened to login and
| see other people dashboard a few times. First time it
| happened hair raised up on my arms thinking someone else
| can see my stuff. I simply logout and logged back in. I
| never manage to delete or do any reckless stuff with other
| people servers. But I feel what the OP was going thru.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Between the two of them, they own less than 20% of the
| company. Is this a lot? Not in my opinion. They sold 80% of
| their company.
| Tostino wrote:
| It's a pretty big pie that got baked, that <20% is quite a
| lot in the scheme of things.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Compared to how much most VC-fueled founders would own at
| IPO stage, sounds like a lot to me.
| tgtweak wrote:
| They are also in the holding co
| [deleted]
| nodesocket wrote:
| As somebody who followed SliceHost (Jason Seats and Matt
| Tanase) the predecessor to DigitalOcean, I 100% knew that
| DigitalOcean was on a trajectory to exit/IPO and be huge early
| on. Bravo, and congratulations to the entire team.
|
| I was also building a startup piggybacking on hosting providers
| around 2012 and 2013 and saw the explosive growth. DigitalOcean
| should be the go-to case study on how to build a developer
| oriented company. Just like SliceHost and PickledOnion before;
| the technical guides on setting up LAMP stacks, Wordpress,
| NGINX, Node.js become resources just as important as
| Stackoverflow and Serverfault. DO showed up first in Google
| search results for technical questions.
| kevinoconnor7 wrote:
| I remember interviewing with DO back in late 2014 and it was
| nuts! The entire interview process took ~3 months and it was
| clear that they were defining the process as they went. The
| entire process was basically: 1. initial call
| with recruiter 2. homework project 3. call with
| engineer to discuss said homework project 4. two phone
| screens with engineers 5. onsite interview with 6
| engineers
|
| Finally I had was at the final step which was a call with Ben
| who was really interesting to talking to as we shared the
| sysadmin background.
|
| They we going through some pretty crazy growth at the time so I
| forgave a lot of disorganization in the interview process.
| Unfortunately I didn't end up getting the role but I'm glad to
| have had that experience; it was definitely an interesting
| point in DigitalOcean's history.
| mamurphy wrote:
| I was bored so I clicked on the key proof in your profile and
| it says it's been revoked.
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| That interview process sounds completely standard.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Not to hijack this sub-thread, but just a general question:
| how does one deal with unethical 'homework projects'? I've
| had a case during an application where I was given a
| 'homework project' that seemed to me very much not like a
| theoretical scenario, but more like the company wanting me to
| do free work for an actual real-world issue they had. Have
| people had situations where you suspected the same? How do
| you deal with it?
| jeffparsons wrote:
| My employer deals with this by compensating candidates for
| their time. Y'know... with money.
|
| We also don't give them our actual problems as homework
| tasks. We'll occasionally talk about our real problems with
| candidates in interviews, but we're very clear about it
| when we do.
|
| It's not a perfect system. Some candidates will choose to
| spend longer on the task so that in the follow-up interview
| they'll have the opportunity to talk about stuff that
| really shows off their strengths, so their effective hourly
| compensation for doing it would be quite low. The task is
| explicitly flexible like this, and we've also hired people
| who spent _half_ the par time on it (e.g. life
| circumstances making spare hours hard to come by) and
| didn't implement much at all, but then were able to
| confidently answer our questions about the bits they didn't
| actually implement.
|
| Even if we were to only hire 1 out of every 15 people who
| get far enough through the pipeline to do the homework task
| (I don't recall the actual numbers) it costs us _nothing_
| to compensate people for their time compared to, e.g., what
| it would cost us to make a bad hire. So it seems like an
| obvious thing to do even if only to stop candidates from
| having to wonder "am I getting screwed here?"
| kgc wrote:
| When I give homework projects, they are extracted from a
| previous part of the interview: What is a personal project
| that you've wanted to do but haven't had time to do? Then I
| just ask them to do that. Win / win.
| temp667 wrote:
| We give new hires a homework project that is directly work
| related. We don't consider it unethical. It's really a
| fantastic way to sort out who can deliver. We used to have
| it be part of the onsite interview - they could sit for a
| few hours and do it.
|
| I like these because they are not games. If you want
| something done, you'd ask an employee to do it. So just ask
| someone to do something you need done.
|
| In our case at least by the time it was something that was
| part of an interview, it had already been implemented on
| the business side. Our projects were usually 2 hours tops?
|
| The idea that this is unethical is wild.
|
| We also do paid internships and have folks actually work on
| stuff that way -> do a good job, pretty good line up for a
| full time position.
| jimhi wrote:
| You are misunderstanding. They are saying it is unethical
| to ask an interviewee to code for free and use that in
| production. In your case you are not doing that, although
| if I interviewed with you and saw the same feature added
| after I submitted the code I would definitely assume you
| did something unethical.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| This happened to me in am interview. It was my first
| software engineering job, so I was a junior. Wound up
| solving a problem one of the senior engineers had been
| struggling with for days. It's probably what got me the
| job. Assuming the company is actually hiring for the role I
| think it's perfectly fine to do this. It identifies people
| who can fill in gaps.
| umvi wrote:
| If it were me I would be like: "here is proof I completed
| it and that it works, source code contingent on my being
| hired ;)"
| xedeon wrote:
| I like the way you think!
| [deleted]
| gist wrote:
| > 2. homework project > 3. call with engineer to discuss said
| homework project
|
| How much time does it typically take (or should take) to
| complete a 'homework' project?
|
| > 4. two phone screens with engineers > 5. onsite interview
| with 6 engineers
|
| This seems very 'camel is a horse by committee' to me.
|
| Reminds me a bit (know it's different) of dating where
| someone wants you to meet their family for approval. I
| immediately pass on those dates (and will add I am happily
| married to a woman who did not do that).
|
| I wonder about situations where it takes so many inputs to
| make a decision to me that speaks a great deal about the
| decision making process being faulty.
|
| Fwiw when I graduated college years ago I was rejected by a
| company (friend of the family no less) who said they couldn't
| hire me because 'yes you are smart but you don't know this
| business' (true I knew zero). So I started a company like
| theirs myself and now many years later they are gone and my
| company (which I sold) still survives. (Will add this was
| years before the internet and common practice for people who
| knew nothing to go into businesses they knew about).
|
| Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my
| point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen? Does
| anyone ever go back and track the people who were rejected
| what happened to them?
| [deleted]
| kevinoconnor7 wrote:
| > How much time does it typically take (or should take) to
| complete a 'homework' project?
|
| I was still in college at the time but I maybe spent 5-10
| hours over the course of a week or so. I do remember it
| took a very long time for them to respond after I had sent
| it in though. I believe the project was to implement a
| basic web crawler in Go.
|
| > Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but
| my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen?
|
| After the homework problem I think that's where they were
| defining the process as they went. They seemed to be
| growing quite a bit at the time (IIRC when I was onsite
| they had just rented two more floors of office space) and I
| had bounced between a few contacts that were brand new to
| the company. The real struggle is that I never knew how
| many more steps were to come, and I'm not sure they knew
| either.
|
| Though after the onsite they e-mailed me almost immediately
| to setup the call with Ben so I think everything had gone
| well up to that point. I don't think the call with Ben went
| poorly so my best guess is that they went with someone that
| had experience rather than a new grad.
|
| FWIW I'm not actually bitter about this. I just found it to
| be an interesting snapshot of a particularly chaotic point
| in the company's history.
| [deleted]
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| > Does anyone ever go back and track the people who were
| rejected what happened to them?
|
| Almost never, in my experience. Several times I came second
| in the running and never heard from them again. Contacting
| them myself didn't work either. Typical shop would rather
| look thru another hundred randos than revisit one decent
| candidate.
| ivanvanderbyl wrote:
| The best year of my career was at DO in 2014/15. We were
| growing like a weed. It was hard to appreciate the magnitude of
| the growth until I compared it to everywhere I've worked since.
|
| It was a heck of a lot of fun. Thanks for bringing me on board.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I love DigitalOcean and would prefer to build my new project on
| their platform. Unfortunately, the one and only thing that is
| keeping me from doing so is their support. It's great, don't get
| me wrong. Whenever I've contacted them I've gotten helpful
| responses.
|
| However, for this particular project I feel like it is important
| to be able to get a human on a phone when I need support. If they
| offered that, I'd move away from AWS in a heartbeat.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| but... have you ever gotten anyone useful and able to do
| anything for you on AWS exorbitantly priced support?
|
| in almost a decade, i havent. actually gotten more done tech
| related by calling the billing support, then i have through
| calling paid technical support.
|
| That said all my experiences with DO support were much worse.
| philliproso wrote:
| I have a $20pm droplet with ubuntu with auto updates (Including
| major release) from 2014. So it has done 14->18. DB with web app.
| I have never had anything more stable since.
| emgo wrote:
| The biggest threat to DigitalOcean is that AWS, Google, and
| Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing
| their own chips. Over times they'll be able to get hardware for
| cheaper, and also more specialized hardware that uses less power.
|
| DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a
| higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft,
| essentially giving money to their competition.
|
| If DigitalOcean doesn't get into semiconductors quickly, the only
| two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by
| a major cloud provider as a low-cost branch, like airlines do.
| natchy wrote:
| > the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be
| acquired by a major cloud provider
|
| Or acquired by a chip maker, like Intel.
| libria wrote:
| > AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by
| designing and manufacturing their own chips
|
| What are the GCP and Azure equivalents of AWS Nitro?
| mywittyname wrote:
| For GCP, it depends. GCP doesn't have a Nitro competitor, but
| they offer Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are more of a
| competitor to nVidia chips, but they are still custom silicon
| in the sense of the GP comment.
|
| GCP, AWS, and Azure seem to all be diverging in their
| specialization. GCP is focusing more on AI/ML/Big Data
| offerings while AWS is more security-aware, and Azure is more
| hybrid-cloud focused.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| GCP feels the most R&Dish, with the K8s and ML innovations.
| AWS seems to just be pushing on every front very well.
| Azure feels as though it's catching up, but a bit more
| sales led/engineering later than the others.
| roland35 wrote:
| Here is an article about Azure at least:
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-
| arm-p...
|
| "Because silicon is a foundational building block for
| technology, we're continuing to invest in our own
| capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing and tools,
| while also fostering and strengthening partnerships with a
| wide range of chip providers," says Microsoft's
| communications chief Frank Shaw.
| jmull wrote:
| I think there's a lot of doubt whether, in the long run, doing
| your own hardware makes sense for a cloud provider.
|
| If you work yourself into a performance dead-end, you can spend
| billions and end up with a chip that isn't particularly
| competitive. Whereas if your supplier does that, you can switch
| suppliers.
|
| You could spend $X billion, end up with a chip that isn't
| particularly competitive and just have to eat those billions.
|
| You bring up airlines... airlines don't build their own
| airplanes.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Plus you have to provide most, or maybe all, of the support
| for software. Not just making compilers and related dev
| tools, but also building and testing of pre-compiled binaries
| for popular OSS.
|
| That's fine for a few major pieces of OSS, and for internal,
| cloud-only software (Redshift, BigQuery), but I don't think
| that concept scales well, or is particularly quick to adapt
| to market shifts.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Also, to pile on, for any company that runs a real sales
| process, Redshift and BigQuery are losing to Snowflake. So
| the argument for custom chips doesn't seem that compelling.
| tekno45 wrote:
| All the cloud providers also USE their huge infrastructure
| for other purposes as well. So when they do hit, it has a big
| effect.
|
| make a chip 2% more efficient in your public cloud AND your
| private cloud, that is also generating money? You've got BIG
| savings.
| ksec wrote:
| Copying a reply [1] I did on HN some time ago. Which should
| add some perspective on the point being discussed.
|
| AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers.
|
| HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud
| Business.
|
| HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other
| market.
|
| HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing
| down anytime soon.
|
| AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS
| product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing
| x86 services to those who needs it )
|
| Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM
| offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server.
|
| >The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple
| chips isn't there.
|
| Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86
| instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU =
| Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large
| customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS
| Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30%
| cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that
| matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of
| applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by
| large margin.
|
| If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time,
| that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge
| competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other
| choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of
| a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a
| commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market. Which
| is why I was extremely worried about Intel. (Half of) The
| lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't
| factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically
| 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that
| shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing
| and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to
| be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a
| delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very
| hard, had no experience in market and product business.
| Luckily that is about to change. Evaluating ARM switch takes
| time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly,
| getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market
| are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in
| motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from
| Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856
| veltas wrote:
| Although the difference with airlines is nobody is pooling
| the wealth of the world into airlines, investors think tech
| is going to take over everything. Your cloud providers are
| being valued like they are going to either run the world at
| some point or get some compensation for being dismantled by
| international policy. And when your investors think this way,
| and you make as much money as these companies do, you might
| as well make your own chips.
| zapita wrote:
| > _You bring up airlines... airlines don 't build their own
| airplanes._
|
| Some of them refurbish and operate their own engines (by far
| the most complex part of the airplane) instead of going to GE
| or Rolls Royce.
|
| Delta actually operates their own oil refinery.
|
| So airlines are in fact a good analogy.
| dusing wrote:
| Interesting theory, maybe DO should partner with Apple.
| xuki wrote:
| Assuming that Apple want to sell their chip to you. And
| that's almost certainly a no.
| pid_0 wrote:
| I just cannot fathom why people would use a tier 2 cloud provider
| over AWS or GCP. It can't possibly be significantly cheaper. The
| tooling is non-existent. There is little third party
| tutorials/documentation compared to tier 1.
|
| Why would anyone buy this?
| johnthedebs wrote:
| Because (comparing DO to AWS) it is much cheaper for many use
| cases, there is good tooling and documentation, and the user
| experience is _dramatically_ better. I 'm curious - on what did
| you base your assumptions?
| gregjw wrote:
| Cool! Long time user, good luck.
| ksec wrote:
| Congrats to DO.
|
| Really like the direction DO is going. Which is something in
| between millions of small VPS firm and giant like AWS. It also
| forced Linode to React. And proved the space in Cloud Hosting
| exist, which company like Vultr and UpCloud are now joining. And
| I think their features are finally close to hitting the perfect
| spot. With all the essential like DBaS, Object Storage and K8s.
|
| They have also ( finally ) introduced AMD EPYC CPU, ( no more
| explicit mention of Intel CPU on their homepage ). Which is good
| for their margin since price / core count are cheaper.
|
| So DO today is something I would like as an AWS competitor in
| 2016. And they are finally here. I am not sure if there are any
| other low hanging fruit at all. Or what features I would want for
| a company competing at this space. It will be things that people
| dont see, like CPU performance, SSD Performance, Services
| Reliability, Interconnect, Better Network, More Locations,
| security improvement....
|
| There are only two suggestions I could think on top of my head
| right now.
|
| First is the pricing structure and list. It is getting very messy
| and AWS like. SSD Storage variant should be a simple calculable
| option, not an extra line on pricing table that tries to bombard
| me with extra information. And I know Basic Droplet are burst-
| able CPU resources, but not showing they are vCPU ( a Single
| Thread ) and calling them CPU doesn't really rhymes with me.
|
| Second is Full BareMetal Monthly option. Something like vultr [1]
| is offering. I am not sure if below $100 is feasible. Basically
| it should be something that offer much better price / performance
| at a monthly payment that pushes people with low spending to
| metal for baseline load with headroom as insurance. Pushing up
| Average User Spending. It should also be attractive to small
| business. ( Although arguably Linode and Vultr has yet to expand
| or launch Metal seems to suggest otherwise )
|
| [1] https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/
| cube00 wrote:
| They lost me after I couldn't switch from CentOS unless I also
| agreed to lose my IP address. Reached out to support and got the
| unhelpful reply of "use another OS version within the CentOS
| family" which didn't really help considering CentOS was charging
| its direction.
| riffic wrote:
| droplets are cattle, not pets.
| covidthrow wrote:
| They have "floating IP addresses" as droplet-agnostic IPs for
| exactly this purpose.
| cube00 wrote:
| A floating IP address couldn't be used in my case because I
| needed a reverse DNS entry and "Floating IPs do not support
| PTR (rDNS) records."
|
| Along with other limitations such as "we do not support IPv6
| floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4" and "floating IPs do
| not support SMTP traffic"
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/
| coder543 wrote:
| When would rDNS actually be useful?
|
| It's probably a failure of imagination on my part that I
| can't think of a use case where I would want that.
|
| Why not just use normal, forward DNS?
| cube00 wrote:
| It's a requirement to send mail to some servers.
|
| "Set up valid reverse DNS records of your IP addresses
| that point to your domain."
|
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Having functioning and accurate reverse-DNS is required
| for mail servers, as lots of mailservers reject mail from
| servers without correct reverse DNS. There's likely other
| protocols where having functioning reverse DNS is a
| necessity or strongly advantageous as well.
| dubcanada wrote:
| You lost me there, their CentOS products are in a separate area
| then the rest of the OS's?
|
| Couldn't you just reformat with what ever OS you want?
| cube00 wrote:
| "You can use any image in your account that runs an OS that
| is in the same family as the Droplet you're rebuilding"
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/
|
| I thought support could help me out given the CentOS
| situation and it being a special case but they weren't even
| aware of what was happening or that users would need to move
| off despite my explanation in the ticket. Hopefully it's
| better now it's more widely known.
| riffic wrote:
| > runs an OS that is in the same family as the Droplet
| you're rebuilding
|
| This line in the documentation might be misleading. Unless
| you have a very old legacy droplet that uses HV-assigned
| kernels, you should be able to reimage your droplet and use
| another OS.
| daywednes wrote:
| what's their IPO valuation?
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| I find this really exciting, since DO has one of the only managed
| PGSQL + K8S combos that seems like it could compete with Google
| and AWS. Always nice to have more competition in this space. With
| IPO funding they can probably really compete. They'll probably
| have their own data centers soon.
| aj_nikhil wrote:
| DO is a dream company. Build something like this.
| breck wrote:
| Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean
| customer: .
|
| Those are the ones just off the top of my head.
|
| Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the
| past near decade.
|
| Excited to see they are financially very healthy.
| firstfewshells wrote:
| They've accrued up losses of $43M, $40M and $35M in the 3
| preceding years. Funny how that's considered financially
| healthy in the world we're living right now.
| breck wrote:
| 25% revenue growth past 2 years and losses have remained
| constant.
|
| If this wasn't hard tech, I would be worried, but this is
| hard capital intensive stuff and looks to me like they are
| doing fine.
|
| If in 10 years there ends up being 1 independent cloud
| company, that would be a pretty amazing business. DO has a
| good a shot as any (only thing I can think off is AWS spins
| out). DO is so good that there I can't think of a worst case
| scenario being anything other than one of the big 3 buys
| them. Best case is the moon.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think it's good to point this out and think a little about
| what "health" means here. Looking at their consolidated
| financial data on page 11, you can see they spend about $1
| providing a service someone pays $2 for. Then all the rest of
| it gets eaten up by salary, r&d and marketing.
|
| It feels like a very different situation than, say, Uber -
| where there's a question about if Uber can balance driver
| payouts and customer fees in a way where they make money. DO,
| instead, is already turning $1 in goods into $2 in revenue
| and they're just looking to grow enough so that $1 in
| potential profit covers everything.
| ttul wrote:
| So long as the investment into growth (sales and marketing)
| is paid back through the cashflow of customers during their
| lifetime, the losses are tolerable.
|
| A provider like DO expects to have customers for many years.
| At 50% gross margins, $100 spent to acquire a $50/yr customer
| will be returned in four years. That may be an acceptable
| trade off.
| mgfist wrote:
| Capital is cheap
| treesknees wrote:
| I ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my
| DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or
| banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it
| impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early
| ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good
| targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at
| the time didn't have hourly rates.
|
| I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint
| my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable
| hosting provider.
| wwarren wrote:
| In my experience this is 100% the case with all IaaS
| providers. AWS's entire IP space is basically on all email
| block lists for example.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I find this extremely hard to believe.
|
| EDIT: Just to clarify, AWS has a lot of IPs, over 100
| million [1]. Let's just speculate that 1/50th might be in
| an overall pool for customer allocation. Do you really
| think the majority of 2M IPs would come back blacklisted in
| some form? I haven't dug in to this to actually see if this
| is the case, but it would seem laughable to even begin to
| think that this might be the case..
|
| [1] https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-
| ipv4-addresses/in...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I think the wording should be changed. I would agree that
| all their EC2's and lightsail instances would be in the
| RBL/RSL's. AWS have an email service specifically for
| this use case.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I would be shocked if even that were true. Well, looks
| like I've got some homework for tonight.
| cube00 wrote:
| It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at
| a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all
| DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers
| were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban
| but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I
| do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I
| found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and
| block the lot.
|
| I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the
| community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did
| nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a
| model like other providers have where you need to request
| permission to send mail from support.
|
| A selection over two years:
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-
| will-d...
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-
| sp...
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-
| serious...
| wrycoder wrote:
| The only issue I've ever had is the login auth email can take
| 20 minutes to arrive at fastmail. This seems to have gotten
| better lately.
|
| What a great service!!
| arcticfox wrote:
| That's pretty much me too. I briefly thought they had a major
| Kubernetes fail recently, but they immediately diagnosed the
| issue and got back to us...We'd shot ourselves in the foot. I
| love DigitalOcean.
| f430 wrote:
| when will DigitalOCean IPO?
| babayega2 wrote:
| Thank you DO for offering hosting for us in Africa who need a
| reliable hosting and fixed rates for the services so that we can
| plan ahead. Also the tutorials are a must have! Like today I used
| Django and DO Space and everything was smooth.
| throwawaygulf wrote:
| I wonder how all the leftist activist employees that were shown
| the door feel after leaving six months ago. Bitcoin's meteoric
| rise, Coinbase market cap at the level that it is, IPO, etc.
|
| Coinbase reduced risk by kicking out leftists. Hopefully the rest
| of SV/Bay Area companies follow suit.
| jimmyed wrote:
| One would imagine they'd make their APIs resilient before this?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Anyone else find it interesting that their revenue graph only
| starts in 2017? At what I'd assume to be a pretty low number
| given how long they've been around and how explosive the VM world
| has grown? Seems like if they hadn't taken all that VC capital
| there's no way they could have afforded any of their growth.
|
| It worried me that they're only at a couple hundred MM in a self-
| proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years.
| quacker wrote:
| _It worried me that they're only at a couple hundred MM in a
| self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years._
|
| Yes. How do they grow further? DO will be compared to AWS and
| Azure in the market, and there's a good chance their stock will
| be punished as a result. Plus, if DO actually makes in-roads in
| market share, AWS is a beast that, if it wants, can crush them
| on pricing and features for long enough to kill them.
| unixhero wrote:
| Fantastic company.
| gist wrote:
| Use case of DO vs. AWS or Google Cloud or similar?
| [deleted]
| erwinh wrote:
| been a fan of DigitalOcean for years. Somehow they were able to
| bring a focus on usability to cloud offerings like no other
| provider could.
|
| Most recent thing that made my life 100x easier is their Apps
| platform with direct Github integrations for deployment of react
| apps removing any need to learn CI/CD stuff which I dont want to
| waste time on in early alpha startup phase :)
| [deleted]
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