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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#151

Post by quantumcd »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #106
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 actually think their UI is too form over function. One particular annoyance I had recently was with the DNS zone editor. It truncates both the record contents and the domain name, which means that if you've got a bunch of long domains with TXT records, telling them apart means copying the contents into a text editor to see the truncated text. e.g somekey._dkim.subdomaina.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA somekey._d…

I agree, but I seem to recall creating/editing records much easier than Route53... particularly with the console redesign.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#152

Post by ryandrake »

jacques_chester wrote: post #98
yte14 wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

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…

What's the difference like today? As a long time Linode customer, I just never even felt the need to shop around. Maybe I should! It's always been just fine for my "tiny duty" Wordpress host. I always knew DO existed, but figured it's the same $5 and I'm probably getting about the same thing so why bother switching. I guess I'm a good example of why stickiness matters.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#153

Post by mattnewton »

ivraatiems wrote: post #128

I might have mentioned this before, but DigitalOcean's support is (or was, before I stopped being their customer) absolutely abysmal. I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.) So I tried another browser, ano…

A small personal project of mine was flagged as compromised or something and taken down. Support couldn’t tell me why, I suspect it had something to do with updating regularly through git? To this day I’ll never know though, moved it to an aws ec2 instance.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#154

Post by cube00 »

treesknees wrote: post #117
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 ha…

It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and block the lot.

I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a model like other providers have where you need to request permission to send mail from support.

A selection over two years: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-d...

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-sp...

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious...

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#155

Post by arcticfox »

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.

That's pretty much me too. I briefly thought they had a major Kubernetes fail recently, but they immediately diagnosed the issue and got back to us...We'd shot ourselves in the foot. I love DigitalOcean.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#156

Post by wwarren »

treesknees wrote: post #117
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 ha…

In my experience this is 100% the case with all IaaS providers. AWS's entire IP space is basically on all email block lists for example.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#157

Post by arcticfox »

mauflows wrote: post #87
ArtWomb wrote: post #11

Would be interesting to see App Platform growth numbers. Lot's of competition: Heroku, Netlify, Fly.io, App Engine, Cloud Run, etc. But they may have hit the sweet spot in terms of features and pricing.

The missing feature for me is more cache control. It's behind cloudflare but not configurable. So you can't cache json for instance

For me, the missing feature is ability to access private networks.

(Noting here, for the DO product manager reviewing the thread..!)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#158

Post by TechBro8615 »

tgtweak wrote: post #136
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.

Between the two of them, they own less than 20% of the company. Is this a lot? Not in my opinion. They sold 80% of their company.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#159

Post by lloeki »

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…

> As a developer, DO never looked anything like it.

The UI, the simplicity, SSDs, additional block storage... but also the API and its doc, as well as IPv6, regions, snapshots/backups, and availability. Later on, load balancers, object storage and k8s. All of that much simpler than AWS and both better thought out and more featureful than Linode or OVH.

DO truly deserved their success.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#160

Post by RKearney »

cashewchoo wrote: post #56
RKearney wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure? $10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth. $10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.

Their VPS pricing is competitive but pretty much everything else isn't. Specifically, I'm looking at EKS vs DO managed k8s, block storage for VPS's, and so on.

DO charges $0.10/GB per month for block storage, the same as AWS Lightsail charges for block storage. AWS also has Lightsail Containers which are far cheaper than EKS and is their DO/Linode/etc equivalent.

Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month.

DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD

AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD

I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.

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