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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#311

Post by banana_giraffe »

JDiculous wrote: post #214
mywittyname wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why I don't use AWS for personal projects (S3 is the only one I'd consider using). EC2 for example is significantly more expensive than a Digital Ocean droplet.

Even S3 can hit random expenses when you least expect it. I let a process go crazy and create billions of objects in S3. Of course AWS was happy to charge me for all of this, but what I wasn't expecting was the charge just to list the objects to delete them. I spent more than $100 just to empty the stupid bucket out.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#312

Post by sillysaurusx »

jjwiseman wrote: post #202
sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" The issue seems to have been that you weren't.

Paid them for four years. If I had known they were going to delete the backups in just over one month, I wouldn’t have risked that.

Lost everything when they deleted the backups. They turned off the server on the same day, and it was running fine right up until then. Zero warning other than the emails I didn’t see.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#313

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#314

Post by HonestShark »

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…

Moisey, big fan of yours, always have been.

DO's board has been atrocious (not you and Ben). The way they handled bonuses even the years that we were growing 40+% because we missed #'s due to factors outside any employees control, was a joke. The hiring of Mark Templeton was one of the absolute worst things that could have happened, he damn near put DO on the brink of destruction.

That said, it seems like Yancey is doing all the right things. The internal DO culture has been coddled for way too long and has been way to top heavy, predominately due to the revolving door of engineering leadership. Since I joined, I've seen Julia, Greg, Dizzy, now Al w/ Barry... and that's been what like 3.5 years?

The Boards support of the current GC is also astonishing, he's been incredibly anti-people and has downright participated in discriminatory practices. I'd HIGHLY encourage DO to setup an ethics hotline, there's been a long-term lack of ability to report concerning behavior without fear of reprisal.

Also, in your previous comments, yes the profitability #'s look surprisingly good, but lets be honest with the community and talk about cash. It's easy to look profitable when you are capitalizing so much, and it's not a fair representation of company performance. While I admittedly don’t really have any transparency into our #’s, its been talked about internally plenty that we have a cash issue. (Although it’s never been indicated that it’s desperate, and for those reading the company isn’t in financial distress, although they’ve been subtly cutting a lot of benefits and doing things to save cash like reduce travel, cut meal benefits, etc).

I'm proud of Yancey and Bill. GC needs to go, period, demonstrate ’togetherness’ Yancey talked about by showing us that accountability applies to all levels. Head of people is doing her best, but we deserve someone that wasn’t a Mark hire that understands our industry, and CTO I'm on the fence about, he's not an inspiring leader.

(Apologies for the throwaway account, surviving here for as long as I have has been difficult. I’ve connected through TOR and two VPNs, and don’t know PW so will never be logging into this account again — so, don’t bother trying to find me.)

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#316

Post by peterwwillis »

sneak wrote: post #232
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…

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

> ".. two CEO changes in the past 18 months and leadership changes that created competing directions in the business .."

They had several different chefs that all had different ideas about the menu, probably resulting in too many odd dishes, and maybe more cooks than necessary. That might lead to not executing well on the dishes at hand. Refocusing on a few good dishes, and making sure there's not too many cooks, might result in a better dinner. Unfortunately, that may require letting some cooks go.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#317

Post by zhte415 »

kull wrote: post #284
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…

Thank you for this comment. We run our startup on DO and seeing news like this always make me wonder if I should start looking for plan B, a new server provider. Your service is outstanding and a transition of 30+ large droplets to some other provider would be painful so I really hope you guys are doing well.

I too am a long term DO user that loves the simplicity and well thought out product, and the customer service.

But that doesn't not mean not having a Plan B just in case. And think it out. Do you want redundancy in provider in case you're blocked? Do want redundancy in payment system in case your bank blocks you? Do want redundancy in data centre in case a data centre is destroyed or becomes unavailable? Other, staff unavaibility plan, etc. All of these have some cost. Think what's most important for you.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#318

Post by pc2g4d »

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…

As a longtime Digital Ocean customer, I just want to say that it's amazingly refreshing to hear directly from somebody with such insider knowledge. Kudos for clarifying the situation for us.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#319

Post by MuffinFlavored »

raiyu wrote: post #235
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not running out of money Are you running at a profit or at a loss?

Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet. We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you…

What's your biggest fear? Are you competing with Heroku free-tier or AWS?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#320

Post by zhte415 »

mrtksn wrote: post #92
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…

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 did similar with Dreamhost back in the day, linking through comments and my signature. Great cheap advertising for a high karma to be recommending you, and I was using them.
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