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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#51
post #25

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#52
post #16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is their network performance in your experience? I think that's the only place I've found them deficient compared to EC2 or others.

Network performance is fine, network reliability is the one you need to watch out for. I'm still working on getting some automated script to detect longer than expected timeouts through HAProxy and then issue a VM reboot through DO's API. It happens often enough that if I experience intermittent downtime, I turn to HAProxy's stats before looking at my munin graphs. But these things will resolve and ease in time. Blee…

We are using a Cisco based network and working closely with them to build a resilient network architecture. We've already encountered a number of bugs within Cisco's platform that have surfaced and are working closely with their TAC to escalate and resolve them permanently not only for DigitalOcean but all providers world wide.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#54
post #32

Given how cheap the price is, I don't think they have a sustainable business model. As far as I can see, there is nothing technically different from their model that allows their service to benefit from any type of economies (of scale/scope) in order to stay competitive. So then my overall question is - how can they offer better service and better hardware (i.e. more expensive) at a cheaper rate? I'm genuinely curiou…

Hi, I'm the CEO of DigitalOcean and we are not operating on a fantasy revenue model. All of our unit economics are positive and we are certainly here for the long haul with a sustainable business model.

To answer your question directly, and without knowing the exact cost structure of our competitors, I would have say that we are generating less margin per unit but we are overall sustainable and growing healthy.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#55
Inspired by the article I signed up and spun up a 512 mb droplet. It eventually came up(although took alot longer than the advertised 55 secs). Felt very sluggish, or maybe they run alot of startup scripts on boot? I tried running "top" and it ran a whole bunch of unfamiliar looking commands using 96% CPU. So I destroyed the droplet and wanted to try a 8gb/4core droplet. In the interface it says it was created in 173 seconds. But now 10 mins later I still cant ssh or ping the given IP. So while the pricing is definately good, and I like the idea of SSD-only storage, my first half-hour impression of the service was that it seems a bit rough around the edges and not something I would want to bet my company's hosting on.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#56
post #51
post #25

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

I have had 0 downtime so far (2 months), and I've been monitoring with Pingdom with 1 second granularity. Which data center are you in?

Mine is in New York. Pingdom is configured to 1 minute resolution and I had 54 minutes of downtime in the last 30 days. Maybe I need to take a snapshot and spin up another instance. Thanks for your reference point.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#57
post #25

The performance/price is good but the server is not reliable at all. Pingdom tracks many 1-minute downtime during the week. I think they have problems in the network, maybe because of the growth? Their support is very good though, I once got $50 credit because the machine/cluster that hosts my VPS was broken...

I've also had the pingdom monitoring on a droplet for the last 2 months and the only downtime I've been alerted to was my fault. Maybe it's on your end?

I used the LAMP stack (in beta) with a low traffic site running PHP5 + MySQL5. Nothing too fancy.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the same thing when I initially switched. I actually had them lose the box I was on, and the backups associated with it. They apologized and indicated it was an issue at the datacenter that they didn't have much control over. They gave me a really nice bit of credit on my account and I've since had no problems. I'm a fan of the pricing as well as their support.

I'm amazed you stuck with a host that lost your data. That would be a complete deal breaker for me; I've never lost so much as a byte with Linode over six years.

They lose my entire VPS too but I always think it's my job to backup my data (they have automatic backup, which costs a bit extra).

And they did credit me for their fault so I think it's fair enough.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#59
I switched to these guys after my reserved instance ran out at AWS. I was paying $50 a month for EC2 small, which was super slow. Since switching to DigitalOcean, not only am I paying $10 a month, but my site feels much much faster now. DO wins because IO is very fast on the SSDs. By comparison, Amazon's EBS is glacial.
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