DigitalOcean is laying off staff • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#71

Post by gscott » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

wastedhours wrote: post #39

ogre_codes wrote: post #27

I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning. As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells: > In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed…

Might there be an opening bell in their future... almost entirely likely.

More likely being sold to Cloudflare

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#72

Post by shakezula » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

Is it just me or are we starting to see the first signs of mass lay-offs in tech? Mozilla, now DigitalOcean, I feel like we're starting to see the first bleeding cuts of the recession take hold.

And I just got my life together, too.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#73

Post by robohoe » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

I really like DO's blogs/documentation. Fairly easy to get into versus AWS. On another hand, AWS has a very broad product offering with very broad documentation - some hit and miss though.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#74

Post by geocrasher » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

esaym wrote: post #66

Weird, when I go to the link, the page immediately redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1.... . Even if I try to just go to techcrunch.com/, same thing. I only notice this because *advertising.com is in my host file on my router so instead of redirecting, I just get a "server not found" error page in firefox. If I open a private tab, techcrunch.com loads fine. Looking at the network…

Sounds like adware. Check your browser extensions.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#75

Post by davnicwil » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

ludamad wrote: post #69

davnicwil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' - it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.

Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible with it

Oh completely agree, not at all saying using old tech is bad in any way and it's completely clear why offical public service stuff prefers it. Just saying it's interesting how this then makes old-looking stuff seem more official, because you're used to everything official generally looking about 10 years old.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#76

Post by tyingq » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

timfrietas wrote: post #30

djsumdog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences). It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed d…

You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :) When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.

You could argue that DO copied Linode.

An interesting thread on the Linode forum when DO launched: https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8303/new-linode-c...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#77

Post by stanferder » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

If they ramped that $5/month to $20/month after X months, I would keep paying it. Digital Ocean is a fantastic deal, everything I've tried straightforwardly works, and the fact that I can't accidentally spend money as I experiment is a real boon.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#78

Post by pascalxus » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

DO makes a great product. I've been using them for many years and I hope that they succeed.

I've used other hosts in the past and had nothing but trouble. Joyent ended one of their hosting plans and I had to migrate EVERYTHING which took forever. Then Rimuhosting had an actual hardware failure that resulted in non-reproducible errors happening very frequently - that company nearly brought down my whole business. Then there was Serverpronto which had too much downtime.

by comparison, DO has been much much better, always up, always trouble free.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#79

Post by christophilus » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

sparkling wrote: post #59

Townley wrote: post #55

I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly. Cloud resources should be a commodity. Providers should offer compute resources, persistent storage, load balancers, and MAYBE a small handful of other services. The way Digital Ocean succeeds against AWS is by aligning itself with this idea, and competing on specialization. Forget competi…

I think they would benefit a lot from adding a thin Heroku-like PaaS layer while keeping the option to "build from scratch".

That’s why they acquired Nanobox, presumably.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#80

Post by shakezula » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

Townley wrote: post #55

I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly. Cloud resources should be a commodity. Providers should offer compute resources, persistent storage, load balancers, and MAYBE a small handful of other services. The way Digital Ocean succeeds against AWS is by aligning itself with this idea, and competing on specialization. Forget competi…

I'm rooting for them too, for the same reason. It's unhealthy for everyone to have Amazon be the only real option for servers. Just look at what happens when Amazon goes down for an hour. It's not hyperbolic to say the entire world notices.

My work doesn't even use Amazon, but when they went down last time, every _other_ service I was using used Amazon, so it didn't matter if I was vendored in or not, I had to just leave work and call it a day.

DigitalOcean is a solid platform and I use them a lot. I really hope they are not only able to succeed but bite into the profits of Amazon and the like.