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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#111

Post by jiofih »

yte14 wrote: post #102
jiofih wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments. EDIT: s/general public/others

I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo. Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.

I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#112

Post by yte14 »

derefr wrote: post #110
yte14 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps it wasn’t their own mental model of the landscape at all, but just what they considered to be the most expedient way of getting the message across in terms customers would understand. Hypothetical analogy: if I were describing my very-first-ever PaaS service, to competitors who’d only ever heard of IaaS services — and this wasn’t the point of the conversation (i.e. I wasn’t trying to sell them on the benefits…

Again, I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the conference example. I’m not arguing over the psychology of multiple conference conversations from ten years ago any further because it’s completely immaterial to my point (and one example of many; the point of the example was that it was openly discussed among competition, not “let’s go to the mat on what constitutes an actual opinion with the assumption that I don’t perceive conversation appropriately”).

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#113

Post by grey-area »

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…

As a user of both services for years, the only point on which they are similar was/is that they both offer shared cheap VMs (as do lots of other services).

Presenting early DO as a ripoff of linode is frankly absurd, the UI, user experience, API, Load balancing, backups, and docs were all vastly superior to Linode, and it honestly felt like the copying was more the other way round as Linode tried to catch up with their UI.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#114

Post by coder543 »

invisiblea wrote: post #99
coder543 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FWIW, if you’re using 75+ connections, it’s probably a good idea to add some kind of Postgres proxy in the middle like pgbouncer. Postgres doesn’t handle lots of connections well because each connection forks off its own full OS process, and the performance can degrade noticeably when you have too many connections to Postgres as a result.

That’s been my experience, at least.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#115

Post by jiofih »

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…

Not being on the same level of feature parity with AWS/GCP can be considered a feature. Not everyone wants to drown in service orchestration and configs

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#116

Post by neom »

tyingq wrote: post #89
neom wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market was considerably too small and it would mean building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20 years" was the main north star.

It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion / year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny, but it is highly fragmented. And I think the solution could be layered on top of what they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons, icons, and little apps to create web server instances and tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basica…

We were too busy building in the wake of AWS. Looking forward and building into the paradigm shift was the strategy (and it seemed to work!). :)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#117

Post by treesknees »

breck wrote: post #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.

I ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at the time didn't have hourly rates.

I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable hosting provider.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#118

Post by tyingq »

neom wrote: post #116
tyingq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion / year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny, but it is highly fragmented. And I think the solution could be layered on top of what they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons, icons, and little apps to create web server instances and tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basica…

We were too busy building in the wake of AWS. Looking forward and building into the paradigm shift was the strategy (and it seemed to work!). :)

Makes sense, though paradoxically, that market is growing by around 10% per year.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#119

Post by havelhovel »

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…

Whether your claim is true or not, there’s more to a product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects poorly on the Linode team.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#120

Post by hobs »

jiofih wrote: post #101
yte14 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments. EDIT: s/general public/others

Well a non-DO employee (and someone who ran things on linode and then on DO) I would say its a fair read and what the mindshare at the time was.

Linode had decent service but honestly the irc channel was pretty toxic to noobs (one of the reasons I left!) and finding a "cheaper linode option" was great.

That might have switched quickly, but it was definitely a thing.

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