DigitalOcean is laying off staff • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#251

Post by raiyu » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:00 PM UTC

hashhar wrote: post #247

raiyu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing. Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology. The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job. I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it…

I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was. It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new…

Absolutely!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#252

Post by totony » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #170

icedchai wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd get too many support requests from customers wondering why all their data disappeared after they rebooted.

I wonder if you could map the writes to the drive to some sort of permanent storage programatically.

This can be done using overlayfs, but it kind of defeats the purpose since you now need a storage device

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#253

Post by echlebek » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

georgeecollins wrote: post #243

sneak wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you lay people off if not to cut costs?

Because of a change in direction of the company. People often have skills and ambitions that relate to specific tasks. If the company no longer wants to do those tasks, those people can become redundant.

People are usually flexible enough to switch directions. I wonder how many of those laid off employees would have been happy to do so given the chance?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#254

Post by penagwin » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #224

shard wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't decided whether DO did the right thing or not, but to be fair, your analogy should be more in the line of "they evicted me and burned everything of mine in the apartment".

But landlords kind of do that... there’s even an entire TV show dedicated to it, called Storage Wars. People didn’t pay the bill for their storage locker so the owners of the locker sell off all the stuff inside.

Context really matters though. Is the storage locker being bidded off because the owner died 5 years ago? What if the last payment was 8 months ago, and you haven't heard from the owner since?

It's a completely different story if you were late by 1 day and they sold all your stuff the next day.

I guess the question here is if DO waited long enough before deleting their droplet. They were over a month late, and I'm assuming they sent notifications....

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#255

Post by markbnj » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:16 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #156

markbnj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not my experience at all. We've been running in production on GCP for almost four years, four k8s clusters and a couple of hundred vms handling ~20k rps at peak, and their support has been excellent. Most importantly we haven't needed it very often.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#256

Post by challenged » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

Eikon wrote: post #201

challenged wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its the damn internet connection for people to access it that is the cost killer. Nope. Any hosting provider will be located at a carrier neutral datacenter or the like. At any of these you will have access to low cost IP transit providers and Internet exchanges. You can buy 100G IP transit for $5k per month, so Internet cost isn't really an issue.

> You can buy 100G IP transit for $5k per month. I'd be curious to learn more, even Cogent is in the $0,20/mbps ballpark which would be ~$20k/month for 100G.

Either you are not purchaisng at scale, or you are way overpaying for Cogent. Hurricane Electric is also less than $0,20/mbps.

If you can't get proper quotes, hit me up. I can always use the residuals for brokering a 100G sale :)

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#257

Post by enos_feedler » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

peteradio wrote: post #209

lallysingh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For acquirers, it makes more sense for it to be some other company that wants to add 'cloud provider' to their list of services. To avoid losing their customers to amazon or google or MS.

Which seems like a good reason for the big ones to swallow it up.

Or at least drive the price up in a bidding war. Whoever actually needs it the most will pay the most.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#258

Post by mrskitch » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

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…

Thanks for posting. I run browserless.io on DO, and want to keep it that way. Many have posted about about how they use DO for small projects, and I started that same way, but now it's the muscle behind a much bigger thing. Appreciate you chiming in.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#259

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:29 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…

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.

And they are competing with AWS Lightsail that have similar prices and offers Windows instances for people who want it.

But even though I am very steeped in the AWS ecosystem and the price of Lightsail is competitive, if I just needed a VPS I would still go with Linode. I can’t imagine AWS’s support being good for anyone who doesn’t have a business support plan.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#260

Post by pier25 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

Everyone knows DO for their VPS but their object storage prices are some of the lowest.

$0.02 per GB stored

$0.01 per GB transferred.

That includes CDN too.

I haven't found a better deal anywhere. Even Blackblaze doesn't offer CDN (AFAIK).