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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#91

Post by yte14 »

fastball wrote: post #88
yte14 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here. If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.

I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#92

Post by Thaxll »

gizmo wrote: post #9

Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of premium we've seen from other tech IPOs. A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in onl…

Because DO is not used in enterprise, there is no reasons to use DO at work when you can use all other cloud providers.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#93

Post by jiofih »

yte14 wrote: post #75
neom wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours

As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.

The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#94

Post by fasteo »

gizmo wrote: post #9

Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of premium we've seen from other tech IPOs. A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in onl…

I saw this as an advantage though. They do not have whale customers bringing a significant % of their revenue. I see lower risk here

"Our average revenue per customer (which we refer to as ARPU) has increased significantly, from $35.97 in 2018 to $40.16 in 2019 to $47.78 in 2020. We have no material customer concentration as our top 25 customers made up 11%, 10% and 9% of our revenue in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively."

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#95

Post by bredren »

staticautomatic wrote: post #33
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

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…

They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.

Content growth done right.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#97

Post by dstick »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #80
bithavoc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess that would be a slightly laborous work around? Install vanilla linux, configure as needed. Save snapshot. Treat it as a custom image :)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#98

Post by jacques_chester »

yte14 wrote: post #54
neom wrote: post #32

Interestingly 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 was on Linode for a while and moved to DigitalOcean. At the time it was a very simple calculus.

DigitalOcean was less established, less mature, offered fewer CPUs and less RAM per dollar and had only two (or was it three?) locations.

But they had SSDs and Linode did not.

The difference in Wordpress performance was night and day. So I switched and I'm still there. Linode dragged its feet on SSDs. I don't care why or how. I cared that I could get what I needed elsewhere.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#99

Post by invisiblea »

coder543 wrote: post #66
invisiblea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm _really_ disappointed with the managed DB service. The "75 simultaneous connections per gigabyte of usable memory" limitation means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.

> means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet. This is the case for literally every managed database service that I'm aware of. You pay a premium for the managed aspect.

That's an entirely fair point, but frustrating that the connection limits are not clearer in the docs.
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