I find this really exciting, since DO has one of the only managed PGSQL + K8S combos that seems like it could compete with Google and AWS. Always nice to have more competition in this space. With IPO funding they can probably really compete. They'll probably have their own data centers soon.
DigitalOcean S-1
71–80 of 442 posts
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#72They lost me after I couldn't switch from CentOS unless I also agreed to lose my IP address. Reached out to support and got the unhelpful reply of "use another OS version within the CentOS family" which didn't really help considering CentOS was charging its direction.
You lost me there, their CentOS products are in a separate area then the rest of the OS's?
Couldn't you just reformat with what ever OS you want?
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#73I 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…
Their support is also very lacking, multi thousand a month spend with them buy tickets still take hours. But support seems the hardest thing to scale especially with the number of tickets they get about things not their fault.
We had the chance to buy a support plan with DO in a previous job. May be worth asking if that's something they can help with?
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it appl…
Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were…
Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it appl…
Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were…
I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.)
Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea.
It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#76There'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.
I use Lightsail mostly to dodge Route 53 fees, since it comes with DNS management and I have a lot of hosted zones. However I'm also not a business and couldn't care less about the CPU throttling.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#77What 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.
I don’t own a business just personal projects, but one reason why I prefer DO over AWS, GCP, and Azure is the billing aspect. With DO I just buy credits and if I go over the limit they cancel my services, I’m fine with that. With AWS I could rack up an insane bill, I’m not fine with that. Notifications about billing is not the same as suspending all services.
This is why I like DO. If other cloud providers do have this please lmk because nothing makes me more nervous than having my personal CC on file with very little retribution as a consumer (I don’t want to get banned from all Google services for doing a charge back).
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I use Lightsail mostly to dodge Route 53 fees, since it comes with DNS management and I have a lot of hosted zones. However I'm also not a business and couldn't care less about the CPU throttling.
That's interesting. I wonder if anyone has made some sort of api shim/facade to automate that route 53 avoidance.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#79Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days, lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think everyone involved knew this day would com…
The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it appl…
I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate attempt to take over the "shared Cpanel hosting" market with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for change...lots of little players.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just double-checked my DO console — yes you can, I have a droplet with both. Edit: I'm wrong, see below.
Maybe we're talking about different things, docs here[0] > You cannot assign a Floating IP to a Droplet created from a custom image. Edit: I wanted to double-check because this would make my life so much easier, but no, I still can't use Floating IP with Custom Images. I imported a FlatcarLinux image from a URL and created a droplet; once the droplet launched, I still see this: > Floating IP: Disabled > Public IPv6 A…
Interesting — checked again and what I'm using is actually a snapshot. Not sure why that makes a difference, sorry for the confusion.