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$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 223 posts

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#51
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious projects. I don't see why this is a joke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031421

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#52
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

"IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards." Far more egregious is that they silently drop port 25 on IPv6. This means that enabling IPv6 will cause mail problems for some destinations (destinations that support IPv6, like Google). When asked they say it's because a /64 is too much address space in the…

I can't talk about port 25, but we have 15 mailservers hosted on $5/per pop with DigitalOcean and with properly setup rDNS and SPF including our IPv6 address, we don't see any problems with deliveribility to gmail via subscription port.

That is on circa 600,000 emails per month sent to gmail.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#53
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

If you want a DO competitor check out vultr.com -- I've used them for years and been quite impressed. They seem at least as good if not better and they have some very interesting features like turn-key BGP and AnyCast hosting.

I have no affiliation with them.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

> I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed. I could say the same about Linode and DO (beginners) vs AWS (pro).

Linode, Slicehost (RIP), the cornucopia of LEB, prgmr, DigitalOcean and friends target hobbyists and small fleets. Their model encourages precious snowflake named machines that aren't disposable and last a while. That model also falls apart beyond on the order of 50-100 nodes, depending on admin competence and documentation. (If you are holding 1,000 machines named after stars or authors or something together with sheer will, consider going disposable and ask me for a beer.)

Amazon is playing a whole different game. Azure is there too. There's a middle, too, where Rackspace Cloud is ending up. They were headed for the Amazon game and seem to have lost momentum. Come to think of it, the middle is littered with those with their eye on competing with Amazon.

With Google's default project quotas, they almost fall in that smaller bucket too (I was surprised by the core quota in particular), but the limits are easy to raise, so they're in the middle somewhere as well.

That's how I'd frame this, not necessarily amateur/pro, but it does sort of break that way. Snowflake/disposable is also the sysadmin/SRE inflection point.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I understand now, thanks for explaining. I thought they used KVM for some reason... But I guess if they use Xen they yeah, they are stuck with whatever kernel they get.

It's a slightly similar story under KVM in these scenarios. Customer kernels are trickier.

Depending on what kind of level of virtualization they opted for, I've run Windows on Linux under KVM. They are doing the "boot a kernel" mode instead of fully virtufalized hardware mode probably to save on resources.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#56
post #49
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people want to run the distro-supplied kernel I read "custom kernel" as in "replace distro-supplied kernel and compile your own with some custom flags and patches".

Well, you can do that too, but the point is that you have control over what kernel your VMs are running and not the hosting provider. From a technical perspective it makes little difference where that kernel comes from; either you control what kernel you're running or you don't.

I was at least thinking that once you pick a distro, they'd be first in line updating the security patches for it (or at least as fast as say your own ops team would). But I guess that is not the case.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#57

Aren't there a bunch of offers of free cloud hosting for Startups? We should list them here. And you don't need to be a YC company...... Microsoft Azure gives hosting to startups under their Bizspark program - get over your prejudice - it's a great way to run Linux machines. Softlayer and Rackspace I think also have programs for startups. Any other companies offer free hosting to startups?

It isn't a prejudice if you don't want to support a company with such a history. Azure could be the best cloud host for all I care, I still wouldn't use them.

In any case, I have no issue with listing them as an option, not everyone feels the same way I do.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#58
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

Custom kernel support is actually available for certain distributions on DigitalOcean, though it's not widely marketed.

Right now, Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 and FreeBSD all allow you to control your kernel version. The next LTS release of Ubuntu in April, 16.04, will also allow you to customize your kernel.

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