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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#171

Post by tasogare »

lloeki wrote: post #159
jiofih wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m customer for years and I don’t use any of the features you mentioned past the first two; I’m part of the 5$ VM crowd for who this is the killer feature. Should OVH have provided on-demand instead of yearly plans for VPS I would have stayed there as I’ve my domains there already.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#172

Post by natchy »

emgo wrote: post #165

The biggest threat to DigitalOcean is that AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips. Over times they'll be able to get hardware for cheaper, and also more specialized hardware that uses less power. DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft, essentially giving money to their compe…

> the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider

Or acquired by a chip maker, like Intel.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#173

Post by viro »

lloeki wrote: post #159
jiofih wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The simper than AWS aspect was one of the main reasons I choose DO to do most of my cloud stuff. Also AWS had this odd habit of not auto charging me so it would go a couple months then I would get hit with multiple months worth of a bill.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#174

Post by wastedhours »

havelhovel wrote: post #119
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…

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.

> more to a product than the underlying technology

Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the product I should be using.

Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#175

Post by jacurtis »

ryandrake wrote: post #152
jacques_chester wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Today the pricing and services are essentially matched. Someone will obviously fight be on this statement, but I think today they are essentially equal from a cost perspective. They all run SSDs and have similar cost per RAM/CPU core.

But as others have said, Linode was around forever. Digital Ocean came in and disrupted them. When DO first came on the scene then you easily could have switched and got more for your money. But Linode has caught up and matched them. Right now they are both good. I have actually been favoring Linode lately with their new interface. But I have $3,000 or so of Digital Ocean credit that I am trying to use up first.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#176

Post by jkaplowitz »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #158
tgtweak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compared to how much most VC-fueled founders would own at IPO stage, sounds like a lot to me.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#177

Post by coder543 »

ec109685 wrote: post #148
nickjj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you figure? The last time I checked Lightsail uses similar CPU credits[0] as their t2 ec2 instances. As long as you're only using a tiny portion of your CPU it's fine but if you start doing work on your instance where your CPU is being used for a sustained amount of time then you run out of CPU credits and performance is drastically degraded. DigitalOcean has no such mechanism. I've never had a droplet's CPU…

Yeah, your right: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/

I haven't really touched Lightsail in years, but this page shows a really nice graph that helps you understand your instance's CPU usage: https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amaz...

From what I've seen of benchmarks online, DO's droplets have better sustained (and often overall) performance than Lightsail, and this looks to be the reason why.

(Which isn't to say people should avoid Lightsail, but I don't think Lightsail is the obvious 1:1 replacement for DO that a couple of people in this thread want it to be. Lightsail intentionally restricts various things to avoid cannibalizing their normal AWS sales.)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#178

Post by trsohmers »

pjfin123 wrote: post #161

Please add GPUs! Google cloud and AWS's interfaces are hard to use. I recently discovered vast.ai which is great but cheap DO GPUs would be more trusted/professional (even if they only had one option).

(Shameless self promotion): Check out Lambda's GPU cloud: https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#179

Post by aantix »

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…

"An aggressive exit strategy" when they started in "2003"?

Aggressive, as in two turtles fighting.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#180

Post by jacurtis »

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. I think their UI is actually a little too creative at times. It has lots of whitespace and a single color and that means people will say "clean", "minimal", "modern", "artsy fartsy".

But I agree, that with something that coins itself "the developer cloud" it should provide critical information first. It is ok to kill some whitespace or put some monospaced fonts in there. You aren't trying to sell me an iPhone, I am trying to manage a server.

Route53 on AWS is what I have been using for domain management and I like it because it doesn't mess around with cute UIs. It is strictly function. Instead of form fields for each TTL line and host line like other sites do, you just get a big multi-line text box and you use spaces and line breaks (gasp) to create your dns listings.

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