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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#191

Post by yowlingcat »

bob1029 wrote: post #150
wakatime wrote: post #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) […

I tell you what... If it weren't for Route53 being as good as it is and getting all of our domains sucked into it's gaping maw, we would be much more likely to hop to different cloud vendors. It is very nice having the entire enterprise tech stack managed through a single vendor when you are a tiny company like we are. That said, I am losing patience with how slow the EC2 instances are considering what we pay. I've g…

For what it's worth, I think that was the premise of hybrid on-prem and multicloud. If you can trade-off availability in your stateless compute and worker layer and you're fine mostly managing it on prem, the cost savings could be very compelling. However, you'll still pay for bandwidth, which is the real killer and recurring expenditure. At the end of the day, there's no getting around that unless you move fully to your own metal, but then you'll likely realize costs related to maintaining your own metal that made you want to switch to the cloud in the first place. One way you might try to test this out is by using bare metal AWS instances -- if it's going on the right direction but you want more savings, you could move to using AWS Outposts with your on prem metal.

Just to make some conjecture here, I think that there's a difference between not liking the market's prices and thinking that the market is mispriced. Another commentator's point that the difference in bandwidth between AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI and DO/etc being a factor of 10x should give you an idea of some of the price discrimination going on.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#193

Post by wgerard »

amerine wrote: post #158
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).

Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly.

There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it.

Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#195

Post by yowlingcat »

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Appreciate the response! Are you at liberty to say a little more about the competing directions that, for lack of a better term, didn't win out? How will these changes impact customers, and could folks be left stranded in any way?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#196

Post by mywittyname »

JDiculous wrote: post #178
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?

They charge you for everything. Data transfer in: charge, data transfer out: charge, DNS lookup: charge, storing a file: charge, etc.

It's one of those situations where it's a death by a thousand cuts. When you're cost provisioning, you can figure out the big stuff, i.e., we need 25 EC2s m4a.2xlarge instances with 40TB of S3 storage, and a 2TB Aurora instance. But once you get the bill, you start seeing the costs of ELBs, NAT gateways, inter-region transfers, etc. Individually, these costs aren't significant, but in aggregate, they can make up a health chunk of your monthly bill.

Plus, their managed solutions are fucking expensive. We moved a self-managed ELK cluster to an AWS-managed one and the costs went up by a factor of two.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#197

Post by bloblaw »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #185
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…

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

> But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?

Sounds like you weren't paying for backups.

tl;dr - customer stops paying service provider, and service provider stops providing services. Customer is upset.

This one's on you.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#198

Post by handruin »

JDiculous wrote: post #178
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?

Perception that they are THE cloud player to use with great reliability and enterprise focus, so people support their protocols and develop their products for AWS and end up with a bit of lock-in. Mid to large enterprise continue to get on the cloud train hype and spend tens, to hundreds of thousands a month on AWS/S3 instance costs and cannot figure out how or why the bill is so expensive. Then they spend internal costs and personal resource time trying to figure out how they spent so much money on AWS. This happens where I work on both the test/dev and also production hosting.

If DO or Linode were an option to consider, we might be able to save so much money but our own customers use and believe in AWS so we develop and test on AWS. It's a bit of a vicious cycle.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#199

Post by raiyu »

yowlingcat wrote: post #195
raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Appreciate the response! Are you at liberty to say a little more about the competing directions that, for lack of a better term, didn't win out? How will these changes impact customers, and could folks be left stranded in any way?

There is no impact to customers now or future.

The changes were mostly internal in how teams were structured and was the result of leadership changes that happened.

From the customer perspective we have never launched a product and then killed it. Anytime you are dealing with infrastructure and building services that other companies rely on for their business you have to be very sure that whatever you launch you plan to support just about forever.

A lot of the changes are actually about getting refocused on what made us successful, which is developers and the larger developer/open source community.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#200

Post by notjustanymike »

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Would you mind teaching StackExchange a thing or two about PR while you're doing a good job here?
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