Use case of DO vs. AWS or Google Cloud or similar?
DigitalOcean S-1
261–270 of 442 posts
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#262Earlier 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.
I don't think it reflects poorly on them at all. When DO started everyone still used the help document of Linode and Slicehost to setup and spin a server on DO. They could do that because DO was a clone of these services. To their credit DO improved and grew, and that's no mean feat.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#263Earlier 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…
Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.
I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times, it has been a horrendous experience.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#264I 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.
I agree, I had limited knowledge on a few things and was able to get it all sorted with their guides. I think they offered an exchange of credits for tutorials or something. My favorite part of their guides, the drop downs to pick your version. Google can give me results to a simple ubuntu question that is ten years old, they had the option to pick which version you were using to get you the correct guides. Brilliant
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#265If someone from DigitalOcean is reading this, PLEASE, we need a datacenter in Brazil.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
As a user, I agree - DO was seen a cheaper clone of Linode / Slicehost when they launched. I used to usually recommend Pair and Linode to my clients and, later DO to my more cost-conscious clients. At that time, I preferred Linode over DO, because the support was better and the prevalent practice than was to look suspiciously at new hosts because a lot of them folded up. You looked to older hosts, like Pair (and later Rackspace and Linode) because you knew they were reliable in both tech and the hosting business.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#267Big fan of DO from start. Intutive UI, cheap resources, never had issue with infra. And great knowledge base. But the fact I loved most is a straight billing. There are never surprises at end of month.
Sadly all mistakes done by AWS are picked up by other big vendors like GCP,Azure. Cloud vendors are more focused on adding as many features as possible. Who cares about user experience ? We got covered by certifications.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#268I 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 would add the DO API being all or nothing with permissions to that list.
Not being able to give just DNS access to a script for updating LE/ACME DNS challenges means it'd be a non-starter at work.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#269I wonder how all the leftist activist employees that were shown the door feel after leaving six months ago. Bitcoin's meteoric rise, Coinbase market cap at the level that it is, IPO, etc.
Coinbase reduced risk by kicking out leftists. Hopefully the rest of SV/Bay Area companies follow suit.
Re: DigitalOcean S-1
#270Interestingly 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…
As a happy Slicehost customer, I definitely saw Slicehost in every aspect of the DO approach.