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DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

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Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#61

Post by dmix »

bananas wrote: post #23
hiphopyo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My logs show increased break-in attempts after moving to Digital Ocean. Their IPs are hot targets for hackers, making it all the more important to properly secure my droplets, something I'm having a hard time doing in Linux. With Linux, it's lot of beating around the bush. Overcomplicated config files, a lot of disabling and removing of things one don't need, having to deal with a messy and outdated firewall. With Op…

Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if the…

I'm amazed noone ever mentions GRSecurity as must have. It will reduce the risks of an actual comprise significantly. Non-patched Linux is always full of rootkit potential.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#62

Post by raiyu »

joe_bleau wrote: post #52
talkingquickly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use them and in general like them but would add to this list; * Can't add backups to an already provisioned node * Undocumented "droplet limits" e.g. one day you'll click "Add Droplet" and it will say "You've reached your droplet limit, please contact support". They'll generally raise it after some basic security verification but it's a nasty shock since you don't find out about it until you need to provision…

I too have been bit by the droplet limit. $60 credit (but no credit card) in my account, wanted to spin up a fast box to build a kernel, but I was locked out of the larger droplets. Never did get a straight answer as to why, just a suggestion to link a credit card. Oh well.

There are two droplet limits, one is the number of droplets that you can spin up which you can see in your settings page:

https://cloud.digitalocean.com/settings

The second is if a customer signs up using Paypal we restrict some of the larger sizes, this is done to minimize the amount of fraud we have to deal with.

Unfortunately we deal with a high amount of abusive and fraudulent signups so we've had to instate a lot of automated filters and other updates to the user experience. It really sucks, but without it we'd have a lot more fraud which would really just make the entire experience worse overall.

In either case opening up a ticket will get either issue resolved.

Sorry for the inconvenience but if anyone is good at fraud detection and wants to help us to continue to automate it and make it smarter, we are hiring =]

Thanks, Moisey

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#63

Post by ceejayoz »

gdubs wrote: post #59
sneak wrote: post #58

DigitalOcean are dishonest with their customers. It's sad to see such a reputable firm throw in with people known to be liars.

I've found them to be a great service.

That doesn't really say anything about the comment you're replying to. You can be happy with a service regardless of their honesty, especially if you're not aware of any dishonesty that's occurring.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#64

Post by jnsaff2 »

bananas wrote: post #23
hiphopyo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My logs show increased break-in attempts after moving to Digital Ocean. Their IPs are hot targets for hackers, making it all the more important to properly secure my droplets, something I'm having a hard time doing in Linux. With Linux, it's lot of beating around the bush. Overcomplicated config files, a lot of disabling and removing of things one don't need, having to deal with a messy and outdated firewall. With Op…

Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if the…

It took me about an hour to put all of this into an ansible playbook. I think there are couple of examples out on blogs about this as well. If there is interest I'll share my playbook.

Writing this playbook paid off already for the second installation of the box.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#65

Post by raiyu »

tshtf wrote: post #35

Broken DigitalOcean promises: IPv6 in Q4 2012: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava... Ability to boot own kernel ("2-3 weeks from Feb 2013"): https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...

Completely agree with you, we definitely broke a few promises.

We ran into this problem because we were used to our development cycle that we had in 2012, but in 2013 our growth really took off and we spent most of our time working on scaling challenges.

That unfortunately pushed us back on a lot of different timelines. Now that we've grown the company from 5 people to over 50 and with this latest round we're finally catching up and able to move things forward at a better pace.

We are reviewing and reprioritizing our product roadmap this weekend and next and will be providing more updated timelines and also issuing more updates if we fall behind on the new estimates.

Thanks, Moisey

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#66

Post by nissimk »

If you can scale your system using only 0.5 GB per node, you get more cpu per dollar since the 5$ and 10$ levels both have 1 cpu. Higher levels seem to be multiples of the 10$ level. Does anyone have experience with this in a production system with a lot of users? Are there horizontally scalable database systems that work well on many nodes with only 512MB each?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#67

Post by royjacobs »

thu wrote: post #33
samwillis wrote: post #31

I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice. I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and increased latency.

Shameless plug: I have started https://reesd.com/ . Not the S3 protocol, simply scp.

How would you go ahead mounting this, though? SSHFS?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#68

Post by bananas »

dmix wrote: post #61
bananas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if the…

I'm amazed noone ever mentions GRSecurity as must have. It will reduce the risks of an actual comprise significantly. Non-patched Linux is always full of rootkit potential.

Well they don't issue GRSecurity kernels.

To be fair I'd just use FreeBSD which has a little better kernel architecture with respect to security.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#69

Post by bmelton »

bananas wrote: post #14

Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing: * kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes. * can't resize or add storage * no freebsd support or custom kernels * VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one. * no IPv6 * somewhat shonky security reputation. * cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been…

Their DMCA / Copyright / bad content process is horribly, horribly broken, and they will generally (where I think generally is the most polite way to put it) take the side of the accuser, even if that accuser is anonymous, or random, or fraudulently making the accusation.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#70

Post by dave_sullivan »

oijaf888 wrote: post #49
dave_sullivan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true in the same way that double taxation is a concern when setting up a corporation. It kind of is, but it's really not. Due to downvotes, I guess I better explain what I mean: Basically, EC2 provides instances where "if you restart your server you lose your data". You don't use those when that would be a problem for you, you use EBS backed instances which do not have this problem. Or you do it some other way…

Double taxation isn't related to the salary you get paid but the dividends that a corporation pays out. A corporation pays taxes on income then when it pays it out as dividends you pay taxes on it again, hence double taxation. As far as I'm aware you are unable to deduct dividend payments from corporate income for the purposes of taxation. So no, its not FUD in that case at all.

Alright, I'll bite.

You're right. But you're not going to avoid the stock market (where you might get paid in dividends) because you want to avoid double taxation. However, when forming a company for the first time, you'll hear double taxation cited as a reason you might not want to form a corporation. This is stupid because you're not going to pay yourself in dividends. Of course there are many reasons you might choose one business form over another -- I'm just saying that double taxation really isn't one of them.

Likewise, if you are deciding between digital ocean and AWS -- there are many reasons why you might want to go with one over the other. One of the reasons is not because you lose all your data when you restart a machine on AWS. I mean, look, I'm considering giving DO a shot for various reasons, but AWS losing my data because of some oversight in their service that DO has fundamentally engineered around isn't one of them.

In both cases, I'm not saying one is better than the other -- all i'm saying is some distinctions are subtly stupid to the point of being manipulative. As in FUD. That's my full thought process on this matter, I don't think I've got anything past that, haha

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