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DigitalOcean App Platform

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181–190 of 357 posts

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#181

Post by pier25 »

The only way this would make sense is if Digital Ocean offered the PaaS layer for free (or very cheap) to boost the sales of their underlying services (droplets, spaces, etc). Otherwise, what's the point? It simply won't be able to compete.

For example, static sites should be included for free on top of Spaces. There's no way this offering will be able to compete with Vercel, Netlify, or Firebase which all offer static sites for free with CDN. Vercel even includes 1TB of traffic per month, for free.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#182

Post by mrkurt »

SahAssar wrote: post #160
mrkurt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we advertised it as a feature to all new signups, with a link to request limits. It's not equivalent to a button, the dirty secret is that when people requested it, I planned to put a notification in my calendar to go look at their usage the last day of the month and adjust their bill accordingly. :) We were concerned about spending time on marginal features that didn't actually matter much to people, so we "laun…

I'm not one of your customers but when I have looked at pay-as-you-go services or autoscaling services before I basically don't even consider any that don't allow me to cap the costs per month or similar. So you could perhaps also consider that if it is only marketed when you sign up and not a clearly defined feature some people (like me) will just never sign up at all.

That's actually why we made a big deal out of it in our launch post. We thought maybe it would attract underserved customers. I am surprised that it had no effect.

My guess is that people who are interested in controlling costs are also not getting enough value from auto scaling services. So we're already not attracting those folks, and offering a cost control feature isn't enough to get us over the hump.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#183

Post by ZephyrBlu »

stickfigure wrote: post #165
user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

Don't forget Google App Engine! Though, it's even more expensive than Heroku.

GAE has a free tier for their smallest instance.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#184

Post by mrkurt »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #178
mrkurt wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". T…

Sounds like we agree on what you're doing, we just disagree about whether it's a good approach. I don't want to need to depend on you being in a good mood to waive fees (or more likely, to hope you're not so low on runway that support gets incentives not to waive them until after your next round closes). I don't want to have to guess whether your terms mean what they say, or whether that giant potential bill might ma…

I think you're not a good customer for us? I'm not sure that makes us hostile, or you wrong, but I'm pretty comfy with how we treat our customers (and they seem cool with it too).

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#185

Post by mdoms »

earthboundkid wrote: post #132
user5994461 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I once had a site hit #1 on HN. It was hosted on a Dreamhost shared VPC with Wordpress. It barely broke a sweat. I have no idea what these guys are doing who are having their sites bulldozed by HN traffic but it's worryingly common for something that should never happen.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#186

Post by ev1 »

donmcronald wrote: post #161
earthboundkid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I don't think so. The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system. Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud…

It's a difference in goals.

- Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down

- Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget

Guess which one they optimise for?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#187

Post by user5994461 »

donmcronald wrote: post #161
earthboundkid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I don't think so. The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system. Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud…

Yes it can, if you consider hundreds of dollars a significant amount. I do.

A good article is around 50k visits. The most I've done was 300k over a few days of going viral on HN/reddit/twitter/other. I published some stats there https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#189

Post by joemclarke »

ksajadi wrote: post #100
user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

There is also Cloud 66 which works with not only digital ocean but many other cloud providers, like a Heroku on top of any cloud.

I use cloud66, it works great!

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#190

Post by NOGDP »

user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

The digital ocean volume pricing of $1/10GB per month seems very steep... I can literally buy fresh SSDs every month for that money. The container pricing is reasonable though.
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