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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#291

Post by zapita »

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…

> You bring up airlines... airlines don't build their own airplanes.

Some of them refurbish and operate their own engines (by far the most complex part of the airplane) instead of going to GE or Rolls Royce.

Delta actually operates their own oil refinery.

So airlines are in fact a good analogy.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#292

Post by robertlagrant »

mywittyname wrote: post #227
libria wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

For GCP, it depends. GCP doesn't have a Nitro competitor, but they offer Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are more of a competitor to nVidia chips, but they are still custom silicon in the sense of the GP comment. GCP, AWS, and Azure seem to all be diverging in their specialization. GCP is focusing more on AI/ML/Big Data offerings while AWS is more security-aware, and Azure is more hybrid-cloud focused.

GCP feels the most R&Dish, with the K8s and ML innovations. AWS seems to just be pushing on every front very well. Azure feels as though it's catching up, but a bit more sales led/engineering later than the others.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#293

Post by robertlagrant »

ivraatiems wrote: post #255
oliverjudge wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity where did you move to?

I moved to BuyVM, https://buyvm.net/ . I had already been using their services for a few years, I just expanded on what I already had. They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal. I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political…

Not treating people differently based on their beliefs sounds like someone with leanings on either side, rather than extremists on either side.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#294

Post by jandrese »

hisyn wrote: post #290
jandrese wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. Their IPv6 support is pants on head. https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/ipv6/ Yes, you read that right, they assign a /124 if you enable IPv6. There is no provision for getting anything larger. All configuration is totally static as well. It's really incredible how botched the setup is, and it has been like this for years . If you're wondering if you're sharing the same /64 with an entire datacenter wort…

This -- this has me a bit frustrated and I'll eventually email them about it. I haven't contacted them about it but that makes sense sadly. So they're getting a /64 from their upstream and just sharing that out to everyone. This isn't IPv4, they need to make this right. Vultr, OTOH, gives each HOST a /64. I've been doing most of my work on Vultr right now so I can use more than 16 IPs on a single host. I was/am hopin…

The smallest allocation a customer should ever get with IPv6 is a /64. You break a lot of stuff when you go smaller. DigitalOcean's approach is kind of like sticking an entire datacenter behind a single IPv4 address.

It's not like it is hard to get IPv6 address space either. All they have to do is ask. A VPS provider like DO can get a /32 easy peasy.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#295

Post by nodesocket »

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…

As somebody who followed SliceHost (Jason Seats and Matt Tanase) the predecessor to DigitalOcean, I 100% knew that DigitalOcean was on a trajectory to exit/IPO and be huge early on. Bravo, and congratulations to the entire team.

I was also building a startup piggybacking on hosting providers around 2012 and 2013 and saw the explosive growth. DigitalOcean should be the go-to case study on how to build a developer oriented company. Just like SliceHost and PickledOnion before; the technical guides on setting up LAMP stacks, Wordpress, NGINX, Node.js become resources just as important as Stackoverflow and Serverfault. DO showed up first in Google search results for technical questions.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#296

Post by indigodaddy »

wwarren wrote: post #156
treesknees wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find this extremely hard to believe.

EDIT: Just to clarify, AWS has a lot of IPs, over 100 million [1]. Let’s just speculate that 1/50th might be in an overall pool for customer allocation. Do you really think the majority of 2M IPs would come back blacklisted in some form? I haven’t dug in to this to actually see if this is the case, but it would seem laughable to even begin to think that this might be the case..

[1] https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#297

Post by riffic »

jtdev wrote: post #105

I was really considering moving from AWS to DO until I noticed this: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse So anyone who's offended by content you might host on DO can report your site and some identity politics obsessed bureauocrat decides if you're cancelled or not...? The public cloud has turned into an Orwellian nightmare.

you do realize that the folks upstream to DigitalOcean, meaning the ISP and data centers, have their own AUP that DigitalOcean is required to meet in order to be their customer?

Every ISP has an abuse process, this isn't very unique here.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#298

Post by CameronNemo »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #65
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…

I wonder what the distribution of revenue per customer looks like. I bet (hope?) that at the low end there are a lot of consumers who set up a $5 droplet to tinker around for a few months without doing much more, and that the revenue figures are propped up by a small group of bigger customers spending much more.

I also think this distribution would be fascinating.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#299

Post by mnordhoff »

jandrese wrote: post #294
hisyn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This -- this has me a bit frustrated and I'll eventually email them about it. I haven't contacted them about it but that makes sense sadly. So they're getting a /64 from their upstream and just sharing that out to everyone. This isn't IPv4, they need to make this right. Vultr, OTOH, gives each HOST a /64. I've been doing most of my work on Vultr right now so I can use more than 16 IPs on a single host. I was/am hopin…

The smallest allocation a customer should ever get with IPv6 is a /64. You break a lot of stuff when you go smaller. DigitalOcean's approach is kind of like sticking an entire datacenter behind a single IPv4 address. It's not like it is hard to get IPv6 address space either. All they have to do is ask. A VPS provider like DO can get a /32 easy peasy.

DigitalOcean has /32s from ARIN and RIPE.

(And a /48 from APNIC???)

(Edit: And a /36, /40 and /48 from APNIC?)

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#300

Post by mixmastamyk »

gist wrote: post #260
kevinoconnor7 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember interviewing with DO back in late 2014 and it was nuts! The entire interview process took ~3 months and it was clear that they were defining the process as they went. The entire process was basically: 1. initial call with recruiter 2. homework project 3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project 4. two phone screens with engineers 5. onsite interview with 6 engineers Finally I had was at the fina…

> 2. homework project > 3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project How much time does it typically take (or should take) to complete a 'homework' project? > 4. two phone screens with engineers > 5. onsite interview with 6 engineers This seems very 'camel is a horse by committee' to me. Reminds me a bit (know it's different) of dating where someone wants you to meet their family for approval. I immediately…

> Does anyone ever go back and track the people who were rejected what happened to them?

Almost never, in my experience. Several times I came second in the running and never heard from them again. Contacting them myself didn't work either. Typical shop would rather look thru another hundred randos than revisit one decent candidate.

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