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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#411

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Thank you for this! As someone who spends okay amount of money on DO ($40, $15, $5, $5), the title of the post gave me a bit of a scare but your comment helped me calm back down. Thank you! I used to be with AWS before (still use their S3) but now I have switched from EC2 to DO droplets. Only thing I am missing with DO is the ability to set up ACL on the firewall itself so it can only be reached via cloudflare and th…

$140 user here. I need DO to stay online for its simplicity. I simply don’t understand AWS and I’m too scared to wreak a subnet while trying to add lambdas and API Gateways. I wouldn’t mind spending double if necessary. Also, clicking in Create Droplet then on a big « $10, xGB RAM » button is incredibly clear to me. Then I « ansible » it and it’s live. Please don’t add too many services to Digital Ocean ;)

Do you have any Ansible scripts to share?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#412
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 it be possible to allow the ability to download one's backups or snapshots?

There are no shortage of requests for this feature and as owner of my data and VM, I'm simply trying to keep an offline backup. Linode has had this feature for a very long time.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#413
post #230

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DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends. Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning. Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them o…

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…

Thanks for taking out the time to share this. Really made my day! DO has one of the best content releated to programming. Keep it up!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#414
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…

Honestly, it really sucks to let people go and I would assume it’s not something taken lightly so I admire you for coming out and taking the time to try and address it as best as you can.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#415
post #363
post #290

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I would assume such things were considered. You should also wonder how many people weren't fired because they did switch directions. Don't assume you have the entire story.

>I would assume such things were considered. >Don't assume you have the entire story. You're contradicting yourself here.

How is that a contradiction? Assuming one thing is not claiming I have the entire story.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#417

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You do understand what a backup is?

Hello @MaxBarraclough and @anoncake, Is there a simple solution for this? DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20. One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data…

I believe a solution like this is an elegant way to ensure that the customer gets what they 'believe' they are buying which is a sure-fire way to keep the customer happy.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of this article is that current customers like myself who read this news are now looking at alternatives. I spend roughly $120/m with DO and have done for the last 2 years. I have a majority 5 usd droplets and 1 20 usd droplet. LightSail may be the way to go for now. Here comes all the migration work.. Fun :)

Why migrate? Afaict, Digital Ocean isn't going anywhere, it's mostly internal restructuring. I'm sure you posted before the comment by one of the cofounders, so definitely give it a read before you make any decisions. Personally, I have more instances on vultr and linode, but I still keep an instance at DO so I have a reason to keep tabs on them. I have no qualms about recommending their service to others.

Yes, I did indeed post this before the comment from the co-founder.

Sticking to DO!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#419
post #96

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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…

This is a huge fear of mine. I tend to do month-long "research" stints where I cut myself off from the world. But I'm yet to set up any backups outside of DO. Also a fear with losing domain names because with namecheap you can't set up any "backup" payment method.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#420
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you didn't pay attention to the emails, didn't pay them, then get mad when they don't store data for free for you? Ok... How should they get ahold of you? A call that you don't answer? A letter that goes unopened? African swallow laden with a note that you don't see? Keep backups elsewhere. Regardless of cloud provider or payment terms or whatever. 3-2-1 backups.

A customer for 4 years and they delete everything after 5 weeks? Can you really defend that? It's pretty clearly a bad policy. You're being facetious about other contact methods, but I think that's a great idea. Allow users to add a phone number. Some people have faulty spam email blockers.
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