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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#241

Post by veltas »

jmull wrote: post #206
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…

I think there's a lot of doubt whether, in the long run, doing your own hardware makes sense for a cloud provider. If you work yourself into a performance dead-end, you can spend billions and end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive. Whereas if your supplier does that, you can switch suppliers. You could spend $X billion, end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive and just have to eat those…

Although the difference with airlines is nobody is pooling the wealth of the world into airlines, investors think tech is going to take over everything. Your cloud providers are being valued like they are going to either run the world at some point or get some compensation for being dismantled by international policy. And when your investors think this way, and you make as much money as these companies do, you might as well make your own chips.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#242

Post by wakatime »

nickjj wrote: post #67

I've been using DO for around 6-7 years now. Really happy with the services overall. I hope nothing changes after IPO'ing. The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around for folks using Spaces. I'm looking fo…

Yep, same experience with Spaces here. That's why we use Spaces for backups only, since it's very affordable and backups don't need millisecond latency.

https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#243

Post by mtnGoat »

Zelphyr wrote: post #226

I love DigitalOcean and would prefer to build my new project on their platform. Unfortunately, the one and only thing that is keeping me from doing so is their support. It's great, don't get me wrong. Whenever I've contacted them I've gotten helpful responses. However, for this particular project I feel like it is important to be able to get a human on a phone when I need support. If they offered that, I'd move away…

but... have you ever gotten anyone useful and able to do anything for you on AWS exorbitantly priced support?

in almost a decade, i havent. actually gotten more done tech related by calling the billing support, then i have through calling paid technical support.

That said all my experiences with DO support were much worse.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#244

Post by yte15 »

disgrunt wrote: post #231
shiftpgdn wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.

They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.

Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the business and running into limitations of their first stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves? Linode was a few years old by that point. For those keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just like everyone else.

Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good people.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#246

Post by MPSimmons »

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…

Their approach to making VPS/Cloud offerings simple and approachable are really what set them apart, in my mind. I run all of my simple things there, because sometimes I don't want or need the complexity that actually managing things in Azure, GCloud, or AWS require.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#247

Post by mtnGoat »

eklavya wrote: post #86
cat199 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain access to more wealth: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... 200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).

Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before they can sell it in the market.

all decisions in the US are driven by dollars, and the guidelines are usually made by those that have a lot of dollars. so they create circular situations to benefit themselves.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#248

Post by 1shooner »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #215
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…

Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.

I remember at that time feeling almost bad for Linode because they had built up so much valuable educational content about what you could run on their services, and I was using it step-by-step on DO. The only differentiator was the price. Of course DO quickly replicated and excelled in providing that tutorial value as well.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#249

Post by neom »

yte15 wrote: post #244
disgrunt wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.

Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the business and running into limitations of their first stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves? Linode was a few years old by that point. For those keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just like everyone else. Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped…

You do know that Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost, was pivotal in the DigitalOcean story also?

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#250

Post by mritchie712 »

mywittyname wrote: post #224
jmull wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot of doubt whether, in the long run, doing your own hardware makes sense for a cloud provider. If you work yourself into a performance dead-end, you can spend billions and end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive. Whereas if your supplier does that, you can switch suppliers. You could spend $X billion, end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive and just have to eat those…

Plus you have to provide most, or maybe all, of the support for software. Not just making compilers and related dev tools, but also building and testing of pre-compiled binaries for popular OSS. That's fine for a few major pieces of OSS, and for internal, cloud-only software (Redshift, BigQuery), but I don't think that concept scales well, or is particularly quick to adapt to market shifts.

Also, to pile on, for any company that runs a real sales process, Redshift and BigQuery are losing to Snowflake. So the argument for custom chips doesn't seem that compelling.
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