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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#101

Post by perryh2 »

btb wrote: post #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…

I create new droplets from time to time and I've never had much of an issue provisioning new instances.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#102

Post by toomuchtodo »

freework wrote: post #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.

Local SSDs are always going to beat out iSCSI (which is what Amazon EBS' are under the hood).

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#103

Post by toomuchtodo »

zagi wrote: post #54
mbesto wrote: 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.

You're making it up on volume (which, as long as there is some margin per unit, is fine). Congratulations!

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#104

Post by graue »

Is anyone else bothered by the vague, overbroad restrictions in DigitalOcean's terms of service? Particularly:

"2.5 You agree that you will NOT use DigitalOcean's services to: [..] Transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in information, software, or materials that is offensive, abusive, inappropriate, malicious, or detrimental"

Almost anything can be offensive to someone. I compared the Linode and AWS terms of service and neither has anything like this. While none of my own content is by any means extreme, the presence of this provision seems like a red flag and has kept me from switching to DO.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#105

Post by benjamincburns »

mwcampbell wrote: post #21

I've played with DigitalOcean some. But I've kept my main VPS on Linode, and also recently recommended Linode for a group that I'm peripherally involved with. Using SSDs for multi-tenant virtualized servers seems like a good idea to me. My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about. However, I h…

> My intuition on this may be wrong, but it seems to me that the lack of variable seek time ought to lessen the variability in I/O performance that one hears so much about.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm limited in my experience, but I believe that's not entirely the case. Modern SAN controllers are optimized for very consistent latency on spinning platter disks, even under heavy load. The big benefit that I see in SSD-backed SANs is increased I/O bandwidth.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#106

Post by dpe82 »

pfg wrote: post #95
dgl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look resolved to me, check the key fingerprint on any Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server droplet: ECDSA key fingerprint is 97:d7:21:81:9b:77:34:bb:f1:8e:86:25:b0:47:6b:ff. Also: -rw------- 1 root root 227 Apr 25 2012 ssh_host_ecdsa_key

I can confirm this on a Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created 15 days ago.

Seems fixed on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 droplet created today.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#107

Post by mschalle »

My one gripe with DigitalOcean is that their customer support leaves a great deal to be desired. For days I've been unable to replicate images across regions (any droplet I try to create gets in a permanent stuck state and can't be killed). I filed a service ticket days ago and was told I'd receive a response shortly but have still heard nothing. I've even sent replies pleading for some recognition that my issue is being worked on, but have received no response and no indication that they are working on my ticket. This does not bode well considering that creating a droplet from an existing image is a major feature of their product, and is not properly working.

While I have liked DO when it works and their prices are great, it comes at a cost. In my case that cost is their product not properly functioning and their team seemingly having no intention of fixing my issue.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#108

Post by jsingleton »

It's a shame that they don't offer Windows as an OS and don't plan to.

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

I did some testing of .NET on Windows vs mono on Linux and unfortunately mono is just too slow. For the money saved on licenses more would have to be spent on hardware. Licensing is a pain though. Working out what you need and how to pay is non-trivial.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#110

Post by Veratyr »

mschalle wrote: post #107

My one gripe with DigitalOcean is that their customer support leaves a great deal to be desired. For days I've been unable to replicate images across regions (any droplet I try to create gets in a permanent stuck state and can't be killed). I filed a service ticket days ago and was told I'd receive a response shortly but have still heard nothing. I've even sent replies pleading for some recognition that my issue is b…

As someone who works in (completely unrelated) support, the numerous emails may be a contributing factor to your problem. Most support is done using last contact as the priority. When you send a new email, you're resetting that counter and bumping yourself to the bottom of the queue.

This was a problem we had with a /particular/ support system (Kayako) and we've since resolved it (with ZenDesk) but if they're using something silly like Kayako, that might be the reason.

Also, if they have a phone number, use it.

Not justifying what they do, just trying to help you work them out.

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