Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean is laying off staff

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 420 posts

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#171

Post by fullstop »

chrshawkes wrote: post #155
ksec wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linode used to have fantastic deals w/their $20 plan, 8 vCPUs!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#172

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

iudqnolq wrote: post #140
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 don't quite understand the economics of referral programs. I'm dealing with levels of customer support to get signed up for a $120/paying signup referral program (cash not credits). I don't understand a) How does this possibly make them money? b) If they want signups that much, why is the flow for joining the referral program so buggy? (It's Mailgun, btw)

a) You make money on people building large architecture on it, and running out of credits and relying on laziness to move it somewhere else.

b) Because as long as some signups happen, noone is testing it.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#173

Post by iudqnolq »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #172
iudqnolq wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand the economics of referral programs. I'm dealing with levels of customer support to get signed up for a $120/paying signup referral program (cash not credits). I don't understand a) How does this possibly make them money? b) If they want signups that much, why is the flow for joining the referral program so buggy? (It's Mailgun, btw)

a) You make money on people building large architecture on it, and running out of credits and relying on laziness to move it somewhere else. b) Because as long as some signups happen, noone is testing it.

> a) You make money on people building large architecture on it, and running out of credits and relying on laziness to move it somewhere else.

My interpretation of their marketing pages is that they pay out referral payments in cash (actually SWIFT, but...) once a signup has something charged to their credit cards. So they can't rely on unused credits. And they lose money on every referred signup that makes them less than $120 in profit.

This seems insane to me, because someone sending tens of thousands of emails to hundreds of people a year gets them less than half that in revenue.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#174

Post by jjeaff »

iudqnolq wrote: post #140
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 don't quite understand the economics of referral programs. I'm dealing with levels of customer support to get signed up for a $120/paying signup referral program (cash not credits). I don't understand a) How does this possibly make them money? b) If they want signups that much, why is the flow for joining the referral program so buggy? (It's Mailgun, btw)

Simple, there is a lifetime value for a customer. As long as the referral payout doesn't exceed the lifetime value, it should be profitable.

Although some undoubtedly pay more than the lifetime value of a customer as a "growth hack". This of course can't go on forever.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#175

Post by spsrich2 »

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. I have a bunch of servers running various workloads. They have been great and I love their product. I really hope they are around for the long term

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#176

Post by danaris »

daxorid wrote: post #136
timfrietas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but one thing Vultr didn't copy from DO is their disgusting and virulent anti-free speech position. The result is a superior product. Today, Vultr offers similar service, at a lower price point, without the risk that your entire account will be suspended for thinking unapproved thoughts. This is a pretty good selling point to anyone who isn't an apparatchik of modern political and social dogma.

I'd call that a significant selling point for DO—not being willing to do business with literal Nazis.

Free speech maximalism as a cover for raging racism (and sexism, and homophobia, etc) is what's disgusting.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#177

Post by teruakohatu »

ogre_codes wrote: post #139
peteradio wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.

Someone mentioned Cloudflare as a possible acquirer which makes a lot more sense than one of the big providers. Though I wouldn't be too surprised to see Google pick them up either.

Cloudflare already controls a significant portion of the Internet. I really hope they do not swollow DO.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#178

Post by JDiculous »

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…

How is AWS so profitable then?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#179

Post by tomjakubowski »

sethammons wrote: post #120
adamc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offered because I love words: jibes ("fits"). https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-tribu-words-wor...

TIL. I have used "jive" instead of "jibe" for a couple of decades. At some point, words change due to usage. I wonder how many people fall into my same boat. And I used it knowing it means "music" - the way it sounded to me was to "jive" was to fit in harmony.

I've mixed jive/jibe up too. I wonder if it's related to betacism. We could be starting a new English dialect!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacism

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#180

Post by pascalxus »

znpy wrote: post #97
pascalxus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting, could you tell us more about your experience with Joyent?

In 2012, They simply sent out an email that said:

"Legacy Service End of Life" here are the details: "We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud.

For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we'd like to walk you through a few options."

So, I had to migrate everything to a new host which was a huge pain at the time because i was running a live Strategy game which are very time consuming to move with a minimal amount of down time, disruption and risk. not to mention everything that goes to changing over the DNS servers to point to the new address. Facebook login also added another layer of complication. It's all doable, but it takes a lot of planning and risk mitigation to get it 100% right with an absolute minimum of downtime.

Other than that, joyent uptime and performance was fine. But, having to move hosts is a big deal breaker.

Post reply on HN