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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

techcrunch.com

101–110 of 420 posts

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#101
post #33

The RGPD wall of Techcrunch is a real put-off (Choice partners that cannot be deactivated, IAB partners that must be unsubscribed from the third party website (which of course does not work), seriously?). No reason to accept this cancer, I will read about this subject elsewhere.

I stopped clicking on techcrunch links a long time ago for same reason. I am pretty sure that wall is not GDPR compliant, because the way to opt-out is not simple and straightforward.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#102

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…

I love DigitalOcean too they have great tutorials. It's one of the best sites around for clear, well-written tutorials.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#103
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed fully. I always have an escape strategy in mind if things go south, but I'm pretty bullish on DO right now. That could always change, certainly.

curious what makes you bullish? i'm a total outsider but it does feel like the walls are closing around smaller players as the big get bigger.

Digital Ocean gives me peace of mind. Unlike Amazon or Google, I am confident I'm not going to get a $300k bill from DO overnight.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#104
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 feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

Even the API and the docs are so well built that it feels like a pet project I found on Github. Where is all of the corporate nonsense cluttering up the API? Where is the overengineered factory templates where I have to set up a bunch of services using a totally different API before I can start my first VM? Why are the docs so straightforward and in one place in one format? This hardly feels like enterprise software at all. I don't even need to pull out the forbidden calculator to figure out what my bill will be at the end of the month, DO even has an API call that includes the price points for the various offerings.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#105

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.

Huh? There have been tons of layoffs in tech in the past year or two. If this were what you consider the start then I suspect you haven't been looking close enough. Spending your time trying to correlate every event to something larger is only going to make you crazy.

We work in a volatile and rapidly changing sector of the economy.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#107
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 l…

Unless DigitalOcean creates their own equivalent of a GovCloud region, they won't be an option in my industry. I do still like using DigitalOcean and Vultr for personal projects and the like.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#108
WakaTime switched to DigitalOcean and we're loving their performance to cost ratio. Their compute droplet machines are much better than AWS ec2[1], especially if you need low-latency SSD IOPs. The only AWS services we still use are S3 and Route53, because S3's performance is better than Spaces[2]. Really hope this doesn't spell bad weather ahead.

[1] DigitalOcean Droplets > AWS Ec2 (based on our production metrics)

[2] AWS S3 > DigitalOcean Spaces (based on our production metrics)

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#109
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…

In terms of similar competitor and ignoring those Cheap VPS, they started the whole $10 and later $5/month price plan. Linode has always maintained its $20 / Node starting price arguing for the exact reason you mentioned, Support Cost. And later DO / Linode became the price plan standards where everyone follows.

I remember at the time I suggested $5 plan should be limited to 1 per account or only for non- public internet facing usage. But the $5 plan made lots of headline and new customers during the growth at all cost stage.

So if $5 plan were really the problem that it was really their own making. Having said all of that I dont think $5 is really their concern. Hardware is cheap, and those plan with vCPU are shared and always over sold. The number of bad actor within the lowest plan are statistically quite small.

I actually think the future should be more like Render[1],

[1] https://render.com

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#110
post #33

The RGPD wall of Techcrunch is a real put-off (Choice partners that cannot be deactivated, IAB partners that must be unsubscribed from the third party website (which of course does not work), seriously?). No reason to accept this cancer, I will read about this subject elsewhere.

I didn't even make it that far. After about 3 or so screens deep with no actual options I noped out of there.
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