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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#42
post #24

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

What's not strong about them? Not everybody needs or wants AWS's 1000+ service offerings. Managed k8s and databases are all most people want.

What’s uptime like on DO managed databases? The primary thing keeping me on AWS is Aurora for MySQL. The uptime we’ve experienced is phenomenal.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#43

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

Doing anything with those big vendors is an absolute headache, and requires a lot of vendor-specific knowledge/experience, which is expensive (and their offerings are generally expensive and/or harder to estimate pricing on).

DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable audience of users who do not need the complexities that those larger vendors offer.

I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an existing ubuntu image on Azure in 2018. Documentation sucked - both what was there and discoverability. Their instructions just... didn't work, the UI was incredibly .... Azure wasn't my choice - client had O365 and their 'IT vendor' had 'credits' on Azure, so... I had to go with Azure... and it was a huge time sink to do some basic stuff that is literally a few clicks with DO and Linode.

Yes, I don't think I can create private VPNs in the cloud with DO - I don't need to for most projects. The level of functionality DO/Linode/etc provide is adequate for a lot of projects, and they are growing their new functionality to serve needs in a way that seems usable by people without needing to be a certified expert in BigVendorCo.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#44
Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean customer: .

Those are the ones just off the top of my head.

Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the past near decade.

Excited to see they are financially very healthy.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#45

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes C…

Agree on all points (and definitely, a mostly happy customer too).

(3) was the cause of numerous production incidents for us. We had to contact support to have it scaled up, and sometimes they'd take up to 3 working days to get back to us. Happily paid more for AWS to get better support, and stability.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#46
Thank you DO for offering hosting for us in Africa who need a reliable hosting and fixed rates for the services so that we can plan ahead. Also the tutorials are a must have! Like today I used Django and DO Space and everything was smooth.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#47

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

The point is that they aren't GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't want to give more money to Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.

This. Some of us are actually disgusted with amazon and prefer not to do business with it. Yes, even AWS

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#48
post #25

There's already a lot of positive comments in here but I'll throw in another one. Tried DO out recently and I like how it set up. I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.

I agree generally, but Lightsail is just obvious hot garbage. The CPU throttling is crazy aggressive, and you'll see it after 30 minutes of use, for all but the 2 most expensive of the 7 total plans.

I don't see how they could be maintaining a decent customer base with that setup, but I guess marketing is powerful.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They currently have an incident with their droplets right now at the time of writing, hardly reliable.

Remember when an AWS outage a few months ago took down like half the Internet?

Yeah, but nobody is going to blame you when half of the internet is down.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#50

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

Doing anything with those big vendors is an absolute headache, and requires a lot of vendor-specific knowledge/experience, which is expensive (and their offerings are generally expensive and/or harder to estimate pricing on). DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable audience of users who do not need the complexities that those larger vendors offer. I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an e…

I think AWS LightSail is what you would want, also Cloud Run is also another option.
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