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$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#71

Post by andrewsomething »

caleblloyd wrote: post #38

Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year. It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money…

Yes. Similar to programs offered by other providers, this credit does expire after one year.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#72

Post by awinograd »

caleblloyd wrote: post #38

Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year. It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money…

Yep--according to their TOS credits expire after one year unless stated otherwise.

From https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/

5.8 As of March 6, 2015, redemption of promotional credit is limited to 12 months from the date of issue (unless otherwise stated), at which time the credit will expire. Upon redemption, promotional credit expires after 12 months unless otherwise defined in the terms of the promotion. For instances where promotional credit was issued or redeemed prior to March 6, 2015, that credit will expire on March 6, 2016.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#73

Post by pcote »

>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies.

I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses.

That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#74

Post by andrewsomething »

rdtsc wrote: post #41
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specific to VM images. "Custom" here means "not baked into Xen," since your filesystem is not considered when spawning a domU kernel except in limited circumstances. In the Xen world, your kernel is provided by your hosting provider. You can apt-get all day and nothing will happen. That is what custom means in this context. "Not yours." Read accordingly; you've made the same flawed point at several spots in this…

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.

Just to confirm, we use KVM across our fleet at DO.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#75

Post by mattkrea »

andrewsomething wrote: post #66
wineisfine wrote: post #12

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.

Hi! I'd love to hear your feedback about our documentation. I work with the team that produces our tutorials. Are there areas you don't think we cover well, or is it something else? With 1,200+ tutorials, our docs are actually something I'm extremely proud of, but we're always looking to improve.

Your tutorials are awesome and while you may not even see this I would love for someone at DO to get on blob storage.

If that was available I could move a lot of things over ($25k/mo on AWS currently). Load balancers and VPCs are also nice but blob storage is a killer.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#76

Post by tim333 »

andrewsomething wrote: post #71
caleblloyd wrote: post #38

Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year. It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money…

Yes. Similar to programs offered by other providers, this credit does expire after one year.

Apparently Bizsparks lasts three years.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#77

Post by CryoLogic »

curun1r wrote: post #24
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

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?

Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders trying to bootstrap a company without external funding are SOL. It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more…

I was able to get one of my websites on Azure hosting when I formed an LLC to manage it. I just had to send out a few emails to developer advocates until one could hook me up.

Granted, I'm on Digital Ocean now for my sites (most more cost effective) - but it was fun to play around with while it was free.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#78

Post by andrewsomething »

mayank wrote: post #15
tshtf wrote: 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…

> 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.

We have a lot of interesting stuff coming up later this year around networking. Some of it will be behind the scenes, but it is going to open up a lot of new possibilities for user-facing features. We're looking to give users a lot more control over their network while maintaining our focus on UX simplicity.

Might be a good time to mention we're hiring network engineers as well:

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers#software-engine...

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#79

Post by ewindisch »

geoka9 wrote: post #67
iolothebard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BizSpark requires a 5 minute write up. It's comically easy to get accepted as an individual if you can string together a few sentences. Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.

"Deploy a Linux VM on Azure. Azure supports a wide range of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Chef and Puppet." Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?

My experience has been positive.

Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve.

As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#80

Post by bmh_ca »

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO.

Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done.

Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical.

The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have been similarly slighted.

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