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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#181

Post by random5634 »

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've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit.

Security:

One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go.

Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this?

They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later?

These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode.

There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170

I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?).

---

Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security.

I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#182

Post by maximus024 »

jamroom wrote: post #141
stanmancan wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compe…

Wow - really? I use both Linode and DO extensively and Linode is better on almost all fronts in my experience. Faster servers, better network, Linode's Object Storage is way better than DO's "spaces" and Linode's support is hands down the better of the two. If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

> If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

I would go with anyone other than Linode, considering they left the control plane running a publicly accessible unpatched version of ColdFusion, which led to multiple instances of them losing control of customer's data.

Anyone but Linode.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#183

Post by ForHackernews »

Thaxll wrote: post #163
heliodor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read through the comments. There are plenty of them stating what they love about DO.

I don't see why you would use DO it's vastly inferior to every cloud provider, the only reason people use DO is for the price, it's cheap compare to AWS, Google or Azure.

It's a lot cheaper, and because it's smaller they don't try to lock you into their own proprietary crap like the big three.

Cost savings + flexibility/avoiding vendor lock-in are DO selling points in my mind.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#184

Post by lapnitnelav »

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…

Hello, I'm the $50 / month customer.

Not an internet business per say, mostly used in the context of processing and storing data + internal apps.

Do is great value, although not the cheapest. They need to double down on the useful items, maybe go a bit offroad in what they offer, lest they might be a in rough spot.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#185

Post by breck »

firstfewshells wrote: post #167
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.

They've accrued up losses of $43M, $40M and $35M in the 3 preceding years. Funny how that's considered financially healthy in the world we're living right now.

25% revenue growth past 2 years and losses have remained constant.

If this wasn't hard tech, I would be worried, but this is hard capital intensive stuff and looks to me like they are doing fine.

If in 10 years there ends up being 1 independent cloud company, that would be a pretty amazing business. DO has a good a shot as any (only thing I can think off is AWS spins out). DO is so good that there I can't think of a worst case scenario being anything other than one of the big 3 buys them. Best case is the moon.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#186

Post by unilynx »

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…

This doesn’t sound right. I know we evaluated linode vs do in 2016, and dropped linode because of lack of volume support. Digitalocean had that, even if only in FRA1, but it surely was ahead of linode back then

(Not sure if block storage came even earlier to other DO data centers, but as those were outside the EU they wouldn’t have been relevant)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#187

Post by lvs »

trsohmers wrote: post #178
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

Are you planning to have an option that is CPU heavy with 1xGPU for CPU-bound loads? Like a g4ad, g4dn type of configuration?

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#188

Post by sjs382 »

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.

This is a major reason that I became a customer and have been for 8+ years.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#189

Post by staysaasy »

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…

In today's frothy market, do you think that they'd only be at $3B? Not baiting at all, I'm curious on how you'd break this down as it's always an arcane art.

I mainly wonder as companies like C3.ai are above a $10B market cap on 50% or less of DO's revenue. And C3 (just to extend the example) is carrying lower margin services revenue as well. Growth is somewhat different, granted.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#190

Post by libria »

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…

> AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips

What are the GCP and Azure equivalents of AWS Nitro?

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