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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#131

Post by gcr »

isalmon wrote: post #12
jtchang wrote: post #10

I used digital ocean to setup a mirror test environment. How is their reliability? I noticed once or twice it I would lose connectivity. I have quite a few boxes on linode and thinking about switching over production infrastructure. EDIT --- And today damn linode decides to go down.

I lose connectivity all the time. Tried to contact their support, they could not do anything. One solution for me is just to use cron job and reboot the VM once the problem is detected.

Are you speaking about linode or digitalocean?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#132

Post by jacques_chester »

elwin wrote: post #42
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…

They offer the same amount of RAM for less than Linode, but they offer fewer cores, which makes me suspect they're putting more VPS's on a single host. I haven't yet run any benchmarks, but I think Linode gives you more CPU and Digital Ocean gives you more memory. It's a little more complicated than "better service and better hardware at a cheaper rate."

To add a little bit of anecdata, I recently move from Linode to DigitalOcean.

On Linode I was getting jammed on I/O; on DigitalOcean I am jammed on CPU.

I'd be happy to give up half my RAM to get twice the cores, actually. I run a modest Wordpress network (http://ozblogistan.com.au). Once MySQL is humming, most of the CPU time is spent on various copies of PHP running the increasingly bloated Wordpress codebase.

(Yes, I've used opcode caching. I've never had good experiences with any of the major ones).

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#133

Post by jacques_chester »

sondh wrote: post #57
Afforess wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apache defaults to using prefork on Linux.

Prefork is pretty much Apache-speak for "please munch all my memory and then lock up if more than a handful of people turn up at once".

Nginx or Lighttpd + PHP-FPM behave almost as badly if you choose dynamic mode and don't pick the right values.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#134

Post by jacques_chester »

eliben wrote: post #127

I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.

It's an artifact of small figures and small sample sizes generally. Anything which grows geometrically will grow progressively more slowly over time when expressed as a percentage.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#135

Post by adventured »

eliben wrote: post #127

I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.

Incorrect. If you were right, then every provider that was small would be skyrocketing up the usage charts. However, that's numerically impossible. Many smaller providers simply die off or never gain any traction.

This time next year, they'll likely be in the top 15 to top 25 on that same list.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#136

Post by jpalomaki »

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…

1 core/512MB/20GB ssd => $5. They state that they are running hexcore hardware. That translates to 6*$5 = $30 per month per server. So that's probably not making much money for them.

But then it looks better if they manage to sell the higher plans. 4cores/8GB/80GB ssd = $80, 2cores/4GB/60GB ssd = $40. These fit easily to single server and that's then $120 per month per server. Compare this to for example some of cheaper dedicated hardware providers like Hetzner [1] who are selling similar dedicated hardware for something like $60-70 per month.

Based on this it could be a sustainable business model, at least if they have enough volume (which seems to be the case, considering the Netcraft article).

(I assumed they are providing dedicated cores and using single socket servers. But it might make more sense to use some relatively cheap multi-cpu servers since with these plans the bottle neck seems to be on the numbers of cores side and not with the memory).

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#137

Post by rcsorensen »

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 had the same thing. Logged in to their web console with the details they sent and restarted the host.

It looks like the network didn't initialize correctly on the first go.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#138

Post by eliben »

adventured wrote: post #135
eliben wrote: post #127

I think Kahneman has a name for this common fallacy in this book -- it's the one wherein small samples always appear to change radically because they are... uhm... small.

Incorrect. If you were right, then every provider that was small would be skyrocketing up the usage charts. However, that's numerically impossible. Many smaller providers simply die off or never gain any traction. This time next year, they'll likely be in the top 15 to top 25 on that same list.

Precisely. When a smaller provider goes from 1000 to 50 users, it's a "ZOMG 95% drop!" while only 950 users left, line noise for bigger providers. You're adding another example to my point.

Naturally I didn't say that all small numbers always change drastically. But those that do change, appear to be more drastic than larger numbers.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#139

Post by voltagex_ »

dergachev wrote: post #26

What's even more exciting is that there's a Vagrant provider for DigitalOcean! I tried it yesterday and it seems to actually work: https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean Basically you put your DO api key in your Vagrant file, and then running "vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean" spins up a new ubuntu VM and runs your chef/puppet provisioner code on them. It's awesome! It uses rsync to mirror your vagrant p…

OK, now I have to try Vagrant, too!

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#140

Post by mdasen »

jpalomaki wrote: post #136
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…

1 core/512MB/20GB ssd => $5. They state that they are running hexcore hardware. That translates to 6*$5 = $30 per month per server. So that's probably not making much money for them. But then it looks better if they manage to sell the higher plans. 4cores/8GB/80GB ssd = $80, 2cores/4GB/60GB ssd = $40. These fit easily to single server and that's then $120 per month per server. Compare this to for example some of chea…

It isn't a dedicated core. Linode offers a $20/mo 8-core instance. That doesn't mean there aren't others sharing those cores. If Linode were offering 8-core Sandy Bridge E5-2670 servers with all 8 of those cores dedicated to you for $20, that would be quite a steal.

The RAM is guaranteed and the processor is shared. Amazon has been working a fixed-compute model on all except their Micro instances. Other providers are sharing cores.

Right now, DigitalOcean is limiting the number of cores exposed to smaller instances. They may change that in the future (there have been hints on their feedback site that they're looking into changing this so that smaller instances could have better burst capabilities).

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