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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#131

Post by stanmancan »

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…

I was a huge Linode fan for years. I used them exclusively. DO showed up and slowly but surely started being the better deal. Lower entry points, better specs, and then finally a more robust product line. I slowly found myself going to DO for new servers and eventually moved everything there for simplicities sake.

Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#132

Post by z92 »

jiofih wrote: post #93
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…

> 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 poi…

Right! Linode was $20/month at least and more focused to businesses. Not the then unbelievable $5/month for SSH ssh accessible virtual box with root access that DO started. Plus the SSD. Other hosting providers later caught on with DO.

But the thing I liked best was their "no hidden cost". You pay what you agreed before to pay. No surprise. No upsell, trick sell which were common with all hosting at that time.

DO still maintains that honesty. Not sure what will happen after their IPO.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#133

Post by fastball »

yte14 wrote: post #91
fastball wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your point makes sweeping claims that "the entire incumbency" thought of DO as a Linode clone.

Can I see your survey results from 10 years ago, or is this an opinion formed by a Linode employee from a handful of conference conversations?

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#134

Post by dartf »

I really want to love DO, but I just can't. 2 main pain points I had from working with it for ~3 month:

1. Spaces keys. There is no way to fine tune access rights. Anyone with spaces key can access any space in the organization and read/write to it. I trust people I work with, but there is always room for a mistake, so even a small chance that someone can accidentally nuke our production space makes me nervous.

2. Something from yesterday: we use new DO apps to deploy a static web app. Yesterday I started to get random 404s for some of the assets, so app become unusable. My colleague in Argentina had same issues, but for different assets. We are lucky that it was a staging app, but imagine it was a production app and that would happen over the weekend? How do you even detect that? Run uptime monitor form dozen different locations?

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#135

Post by sofixa »

Graffur wrote: 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 feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.

Nope, the biggest competition is in the same niche - Linode, OVH, Scaleway.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#136

Post by tgtweak »

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…

I'm really happy to see Ben and Moisey get this far. They are both extremely competent sysadmins and system architects too.

They retained a lot of equity as well - good to see.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#137

Post by coder543 »

cube00 wrote: post #121
covidthrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have "floating IP addresses" as droplet-agnostic IPs for exactly this purpose.

A floating IP address couldn't be used in my case because I needed a reverse DNS entry and "Floating IPs do not support PTR (rDNS) records." Along with other limitations such as "we do not support IPv6 floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4" and "floating IPs do not support SMTP traffic" https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/

When would rDNS actually be useful?

It's probably a failure of imagination on my part that I can't think of a use case where I would want that.

Why not just use normal, forward DNS?

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#138

Post by fastball »

invisiblea wrote: post #61
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…

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.

I'm very happy with the managed DB service. A few gotchas, but the service itself has been incredibly stable with 100% uptime from what I can tell.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#139

Post by nly »

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…

$50 seems pretty good when you can get a $5 droplet.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#140

Post by fastball »

coder543 wrote: post #114
invisiblea wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And DO's hosted Postgres allows you to easily configure pgbouncer.
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