Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean App Platform

pages.news.digitalocean.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 357 posts

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#131

Post by hundchenkatze »

pomatic wrote: post #128
ohgodplsno wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bought access to X servers knowingly (because you can't do that by accident), let them sit here knowingly, then got billed the exact number that was listed, but somehow that's DigitalOcean's fault ?

> let them sit here knowingly Nothing was deployed. Zip, zero, zilch resources were used month-on-month. My fault, yes, but naively I assumed if this was the case, billing would automatically drop to zero. Whilst I bought access to X servers but had no way to remove the charge associated with that without contacting customer services when I decided X=0, permanently. I mean, really? I have no problem with PAYG or PAYG…

> Nothing was deployed. Zip, zero, zilch resources were used month-on-month.

This is like leasing a car, leaving it parked, and then complaining you have to pay the lease.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#132

Post by earthboundkid »

user5994461 wrote: post #124
076ae80a-3c97-4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably worth looking into the big cloud providers rather than the little guys. In Azure you can have an app service (a deployed app in any one of loads of languages without looking after the machine it sits on) with 1.75GB RAM for about $12 a month. Obviously your usage may vary and that will effect the price. But I get the feeling that the big players are cheaper than people think they are for small projects.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill. As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featur…

Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweeted about it!) and not had to pay for bandwidth.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#133

Post by earthboundkid »

ilaksh wrote: post #59
ramon wrote: post #48

Azure Static Web App is free and no limits compared to this offer, I can also scale Web Apps in Azure, not sure why I would choose the digital ocean option. Competition is good for us at least :).

Free with no limits? For how long? What a load.

Free, as in bear trap in the woods.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#134

Post by ohgodplsno »

pomatic wrote: post #128
ohgodplsno wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bought access to X servers knowingly (because you can't do that by accident), let them sit here knowingly, then got billed the exact number that was listed, but somehow that's DigitalOcean's fault ?

> let them sit here knowingly Nothing was deployed. Zip, zero, zilch resources were used month-on-month. My fault, yes, but naively I assumed if this was the case, billing would automatically drop to zero. Whilst I bought access to X servers but had no way to remove the charge associated with that without contacting customer services when I decided X=0, permanently. I mean, really? I have no problem with PAYG or PAYG…

So, you simply did not read the pricing page, that explicitly says that it's going to bill you that, and that you do whatever you want with it. And /or have never used a VPS service before . You are quite literally renting space and CPU time on their servers, that they are keeping (mostly) free and reserved for you.

You don't complain that you were charged $200 for renting a parking space and never using it, no reason for this to be different for servers.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#135

Post by anurag »

matt2000 wrote: post #102
colinclerk wrote: post #71

We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low. I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (…

Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.

Render runs on multiple VM providers (including GCP and AWS), and soon on bare metal. More info on geographies here: https://render.com/docs/regions

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#137

Post by johncena33 »

aejnsn wrote: post #62

HN when discussing their own project milestones: "Agile everything! Organic features." HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!"

> HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!"

You are describing internet mostly. There's simply too many unreasonable people on the internet.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#138

Post by mattste »

matt2000 wrote: post #102
colinclerk wrote: post #71

We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low. I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (…

Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.

This was a pain point for me when I was first evaluating them too. I had to manually email support for them to inform me they run in GCP US West

EDIT: see sibling comment from anurag. It appears they now list the regions they support in their documentation.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#139

Post by mrkurt »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #93
mrkurt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, we (Fly.io) have this feature, and announced it as part of our launch post on HN. But literally no one has asked us to enable it on their apps. So we never made it self service. I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the…

> putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company. What a customer-hostile thing to say, never working with you! What if I told you that if you're actually trying to build a relationship with your customers and have them want to do business with you, it's best to focus on solving their problems as opposed to taking as much of their money as possible.

> What a customer-hostile thing to say, never working with you!

The point is that I'd rather just wave surprise fees than build a bunch of infrastructure to prevent them. From what we can tell, customers almost never have surprise bursts of traffic, but it's something they think about a lot. It's pretty easy to just say "you're not responsible for expenses associated with abuse or attacks or other nasty surprises".

The purpose of a metered service is to give people access to tools and features that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise. The trade off is that the expense also grows incrementally.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#140

Post by mrkurt »

nicoburns wrote: post #61
mrkurt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, we (Fly.io) have this feature, and announced it as part of our launch post on HN. But literally no one has asked us to enable it on their apps. So we never made it self service. I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the…

> It's tremendously difficult to compete against the AWS's of the world, putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company. It's also something that people actively dislike about AWS, and thus a good selling point. Albeit it's probably mostly smaller projects that care about this.

It sounds like a good selling point but I don't think it works out that way. People dislike a lot of things about AWS and it's still something that almost every technical business spends money on.
Post reply on HN