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DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

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Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#251

Post by serverQuestion »

hnzix wrote: post #162
YourMatt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they just a middleman for AWS anyway?

AWS is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). You need to worry about load balancers, backup scripts, firewalls etc. Ie you need a plausible sysadmin to run it. Even Elastic Beanstalk requires some sysadmin. Heroku is platform as a service (PaaS). It abstracts away the complexity of AWS. The base cost is more expensive than raw AWS but you don't need to source and pay for a sysadmin. AWS, Heroku and DO aren't "better" t…

I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such.

With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#252

Post by mercer »

dcchambers wrote: post #87

I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise. If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options. If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. How does DO get out of thi…

In my case I found it beneficial to just move everything to Hetzner. It offered everything I need at a lower price, and I foresee that for some of my projects I'll need to get 'proper' servers instead of the lowest-tier VPS offerings. It's easier to do that when it's all in the same ecosystem.

That said, it's only been barely worth the hassle. The difference in cost for the lowest tier, at least, is almost a rounding error in my finances.

Furthermore, it feels strange that I still often end up at DO pages for various tutorials or articles to help me set things up.

I guess mostly I still find myself fond of DO, have been helped immensely by their free articles and tutorials, and am immensely impressed that they haven't gone to shit like all the shared hosting providers I've churned through in the years before I moved to DO. and while it was ultimately worth it for me to move all my projects to Hetzner, I wouldn't particularly recommend that approach to anyone unless <10$ a month is something they are concerned about.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#253

Post by mercer »

lwb wrote: post #137
tmpz22 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Linode is comparable price wise and in Europe there are cheaper options like OVH. Digital Ocean pricing becomes pretty comparable with GCP and others when you start specing up to a "production-grade" server i.e. the kind of server you actually want to run Postgres on. Their K8s offering I think is the cheapest of all major providers but you lose out of secondary benefits like GKE's fantastic log analysis…

Just popping in to say that OVH is the cheapest option for a reason -- support/monitoring/any other features you might want are just not there like they might be on other providers. I host a single tiny website on OVH and they restart it randomly every ~4 months without warning (seriously). It was annoying at first until I set our services to run on system boot. Some more discussion at discourse.org that's relevant:…

I have multiple projects on the cheapest Hetzner.cloud offering and haven't run into any of these issues. might be worth looking into.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#255

Post by slig »

serverQuestion wrote: post #251
hnzix wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). You need to worry about load balancers, backup scripts, firewalls etc. Ie you need a plausible sysadmin to run it. Even Elastic Beanstalk requires some sysadmin. Heroku is platform as a service (PaaS). It abstracts away the complexity of AWS. The base cost is more expensive than raw AWS but you don't need to source and pay for a sysadmin. AWS, Heroku and DO aren't "better" t…

I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such. With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.

Have you tried Dokku?

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#256

Post by tyingq »

ac29 wrote: post #140
numbers wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.

AWS Lightsail has a $3.50/month option that might work for you if you want a VM. You could even consider something like nearlyfreespeech.net if you dont need full control of the tech stack.

Lightsail viciously throttles to something like 5% of original CPU after only a bit of use. Not suitable for much.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#257

Post by [deleted] »

kaetemi wrote: post #186
scarface74 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not counting depreciation as part of your loss in a business is about like all of the Uber drivers who don’t take into account the wear and tear on their cars when calculating how much money they are making. Depreciation is a real expense. If you depreciate an asset down from $1000 to $0 in 3 years, you’re accounting for the fact that in three years you are going to have to replace it. There is a reason we have GAAP,…

Imagine you're a growing startup, and you have a yearly recurring investment (you're growing, after all!) of $1000 that's linearly depreciated over 5 years. Let's say your income is 1100$ each year. Your profit, according to accounting, would be 900$ for the first year, counting only $200 of the investment, then for the following years you'll see a profit of $700, $500, $300, and $100, as the investments accumulate.…

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#258

Post by PedroBatista »

dkersten wrote: post #248
Legogris wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their documented "minimum requirements" are quite ridiculous TBH. I mean, officially Vault requires 6 Consul servers (dedicated to Vault, mind you) to be considered ready for production. I doubt most companies using Vault with Consul follows this. You I think you could be fine with 3 of the smallest machine types.

That’s basically what put me off trying nomad. Nit just the minimum number, but also their stated hardware requirements. From their documentation: Nomad servers may need to be run on large machine instances. We suggest having between 4-8+ cores, 16-32 GB+ of memory, 40-80 GB+ of fast disk and significant network bandwidth Basically the cost if the Nomad masters would be much greater than the cost of what would run my…

They ( and many others ) better pray central banks keep printing money by the ton, because once the crunch comes these IT SUVs will be the first to go.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#259

Post by kokey »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #237
treis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is not typically depreciated though. DO is writing code now that will last for decades but they have to take the accounting hit for it in one year.

At least in my small European country, I believe you can use a deprecation schedule for software as long you buy it externally, instead of creating it in-house. The same is true for other creative work/IP. The reasoning being, I believe, that it is hard to appreciate (as in: set a monetary value) for such work. If you buy, you’ve given the open market a chance to work its magic and the price is believed to be closer…

This might go a long way towards explaining why company management in Europe often have some kind of mysterious love for vendor supplied software and doesn't see any in-house development as a competitive advantage or worth spending on maintaining.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#260

Post by btzll »

gexla wrote: post #231

Echoing a lot of other comments here. I don't get why DigitalOcean exists. I would never use them over AWS, GCP, or Azure. They can't beat anyone on cost or functionality. I'm not convinced on simplicity. The other platforms aren't that difficult to use and for some you have to deal with regardless. For example, if you want to use Google Maps, then you need to use GCP to get access to the API. Since you're already in…

"I don't get why Ubuntu exists, I would never use it over Mac or Windows"

Having options is good, and there are many reasons someone would prefer them over AWS, GCP or Azure.

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