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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#151

Post by milankragujevic »

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…

> 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.

Well, to be honest, Vultr has 2.5$ (IPv6 only) and 3.5$ plans. So, if they're getting by, so could DO.

https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing

I actually migrated from DO to Vultr because at the time DO offered 512 MB RAM for $5, while Vultr offered it for $2.5. And Vultr gave me $50 bonus platform credit on sign up, valid for about 18 months (accounting for possible overage fees).

I'm still on Vultr, 3 years on. No problems at all, other than billing issues (accidentally was assigned Australian VAT despite living in Serbia), I had no support tickets. After some time I started using more instances, and more powerful instances, and more services (block storage, "portable" IPs, object storage, internal networks, etc).

I've had a lot of problems with DO's Object storage which was also one reason to move away from them. Problems were quite catastrophic in nature, i.e. the files were unavailable for a few hours every few weeks.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#152

Post by mrtksn »

alexellisuk wrote: post #141
mrtksn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a referral program that turned DigitalOcean to free hosting for me. A few years ago I got annoyed with something, wrote an article about how to fix it using a DO instance, linked to DO with my referral code and racked up thousands of $ in a payout. I used most when experimenting and feeling too lazy to shut down instances(because I didn't want to go through backup since maybe I will use it later etc).…

I have a lot of content on DO, and a few hundred referrals but most are pending, devs aren't even spending enough to trigger a payout.

I have about 2K paid out, over 10K pending. My referrals are mostly techies but not necessarily developers.

IMHO referrals work amazing when people you refer mostly want this problem to go away and it's not their primary occupation.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#153

Post by matoro »

derefr wrote: post #143
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…

> 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 broken programs running that chew through this precious resource for no reason. If you throttle them, they'll complain. This makes it sound like you could get a big win in the VPS-provider space by drawi…

I use Scaleway which does it this way. It was very nice to be able to detach my rootfs when my CPU blew up and just make it the rootfs of another instance.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#154

Post by ForHackernews »

lozaning wrote: post #133
biztos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

One of the interesting metrics from my time working in global escalations for one of the worlds largest electronics manufacturers is that most customers don't call in for support, but on average we get 3.5 calls per user per account lifetime. The 80/20 rule in in full effect here. The 'needy' customers are extremely resource intensive.

Unless you're a business that differentiates itself with good customer support, you can just fire expensive customers.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#155

Post by chrshawkes »

ksec wrote: post #109
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…

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 inte…

Linode is a sponsor to my YouTube channel. They have 5.00 plans and have for well over a year now. 10.00 plans too. Linode seems to be doing quite well. They tout themselves as the largest privately held cloud hosting company in the world and keep opening new locations.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#156

Post by jimmaswell »

markbnj wrote: post #116
shakezula wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's unhealthy for everyone to have Amazon be the only real option for servers I'm not belittling AWS' commanding market share, but they are hardly the "only real option for servers." Google and Azure are both in the leviathan league and have competitive pricing.

Google has the worst customer service I've ever heard of and people get wrongly banned from Google Cloud with no recourse all the time. It's not a real option to do anything vaguely important on.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#157

Post by jvagner »

milankragujevic wrote: post #151
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…

> 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 $5/mo plan. Well, to be honest, Vultr has 2.5$ (IPv6 only) and 3.5$ plans. So, if they're getting by, so could DO. https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing I actually migrated from DO to Vultr because at the time…

I think you're making the OPs point for them.

And we have no idea if a similar action by Vultr is imminent (I'm not saying it is -- but we don't know).

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#158

Post by amerine »

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.

Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#159

Post by sekh60 »

blackflame wrote: post #126
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…

Maybe instead of using expensive SSDs. A topology of many spanning disks in large ZFS clusters by using PCIe HDD controllers. Then link the machines via 10GBe could provide you the speed and performance you require require. I've set up a moderate size pool of 1Pb across 16 physical servers on 4 full size racks. This cost less than 50k. Electricity and cooling come from solar. Its the damn internet connection for peop…

I believe DO uses Ceph for storage, much more scalable than a do-it-yourself zfs solution and a lot easier to manage.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#160

Post by sdan »

jandrese wrote: post #93
enos_feedler wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.

I guess iCloud is hosted on AWS? I never actually looked. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for Apple though. And if it did happen I guess that wouldn't be so bad, I mean it could be worse. Oracle could decide to get into the cloud business by buying out DO.

I'm pretty sure iCloud is hosted on Apple's servers now.

A couple months ago on HN, a graph of cloud spending for the big Ns came out and Apple has slowly moved everything onto their own server in 2017/2018

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