Earlier 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…
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…
First, you guys had the customer support interface compromise in 2013, and the worst part about that was the way that it was handled by your organization. Linode wouldn't own up to the compromise initially, dragged their feet on announcing anything about it, and then tried to downplay it.
Then there was another similar incident in 2016, and, amazingly, the response from Linode was nearly identical to 2013. No lessons learned. After that, I started seeing influential people on HN say things like, "don't use Linode". I stayed on Linode, but I also started using DigitalOcean after the 2013 compromise and split my hosted services evenly between the two of you after 2016.
DigitalOcean aggressively iterated multiple aspects of their products in that time period. They announced block storage in 2016. Your customers immediately started asking when Linode would come out with a competing service, and that didn't happen until 2018. Here, it was Linode rushing to build a DigitalOcean feature.
Linode initially focused on expanding RAM and disk space for your customers' instances at the same price points. Every year, you'd announce, "hey, we're doubling your RAM!" or some such thing. It was awesome, but I also thought at the time that you were shooting yourselves in the foot. How many customers looked at that and went, "yep, cool, now I can downsize my Linode and give them less money each month"? I know I did, at least a couple of times.
Then, you chose to try to compete with DigitalOcean on price. As a long time Linode customer, I never wanted that. If I want a $5 VPS, I'll just go to DigitalOcean. Hell, you shouldn't even want me as a customer for $5. Let them deal with me instead. I wanted Linode to be the larger, slightly more expensive provider with the even better support.
I've had to deal with Linode support a few times over the years. They've mostly been awesome and first class. I've never been unhappy enough with Linode to want to leave altogether. Both of you should be focused on eating AWS, not each other; showing up to a competitor's HN thread to complain about them being copycats is really poor form.