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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very odd that both a "Googler" and a VPS provider would be naive enough to think that telling someone to delete a blog post "OR ELSE" would result in anything but the pasting of the content everywhere under the sun outside of google/DO's control to spread the word on how evil they were. I guess it could happen, but wow.. its like trying to get Beyonce derp face or whatever meme removed from the internet

It seems odd to me that DO never bothered to make any kind of statement to counter this guy's claims (at least not that I've seen), especially considering how well-known this story has become. That tells me that DO is either guilty or doesn't care enough about their reputation to even so much as publish a statement to help ease customers' (and potential customers) fears/worries. That's enough for me to stay away from…

Just because someone have not commented on something does not mean they are guilty. They might not know about it. Some people live in the real world, with a large latency to news, e-mail or social media outlets. Yeah, I know, it is strange.

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

#162
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel. not sure if digital ocean has customers in the $20k+/month range, but they are by far the least demanding. pretty incredible isn't it?

> the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel.

This is not restricted to web hosting, but common human behavior.

I've freelanced as a web dev and wedding photographer in the past. Low paying clients typically demand much more than higher paying ones.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about EBS, however I kind of scratch my head over S3. Yeah, I guess it's integrated in the sense that you can access it from the same account, however, try creating an EC2 instance without a publicly addressable IP. You can't access S3 at all from your VPC, which makes S3 not usable in many use cases.

> however, try creating an EC2 instance without a publicly addressable IP. You can't access S3 at all from your VPC, which makes S3 not usable in many use cases. I don't see the problem with this. Either give your EC2 instance in your VPC a dedicated public IP and configure the security group to disallow all inbound connections, or use a public IP that routes all traffic for your VPC and again, secure it with a secur…

My use case is different. I want to put data into S3, but want it only accessible on my instances in the VPC, none of which I want to have access to the outside world.

I realize many people probably don't have this particular need, however, I don't think it's completely unreasonable. Instead, I'm just mounting an EBS volume on an instance and running nginx to serve files.

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

#164
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Didn't know it was displayed in settings, really useful, thanks. My suggestion would be that there should be some sort of notice on the Droplet list page if you're at your limit.

I suggest this because I've been using Digital Ocean for quite a while (several different accounts for different projects/ clients) and have never needed to look at that page.

The need for limits and additional verification makes complete sense, but it would be useful for it to be highlighted in advance (e.g. in an intro email or banner) so you can deal with it in advance of it becoming a problem.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems odd to me that DO never bothered to make any kind of statement to counter this guy's claims (at least not that I've seen), especially considering how well-known this story has become. That tells me that DO is either guilty or doesn't care enough about their reputation to even so much as publish a statement to help ease customers' (and potential customers) fears/worries. That's enough for me to stay away from…

Just because someone have not commented on something does not mean they are guilty. They might not know about it. Some people live in the real world, with a large latency to news, e-mail or social media outlets. Yeah, I know, it is strange.

The post made the front page on HN a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016735. DO staff seem to spend quite a bit of time responding to threads on HN in general, so that would be surprising.

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

#166
post #27

I use linode and was drawing comparisons between two: 1. 8 cores on linode is what binds me to it. Linode rules here 2. Digital ocean is cheaper than linode 3. More Network transfer in linode (minimum 2TB) 4. Digital ocean offers more RAM 5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. DO Rules.. What else...

Rocksteady reliability, I've had zero unplanned downtime on Linode over 2-12 nodes in 5 years. DO had lots of hiccups with it's networking when I tried them (though was over a year ago so ymmv). Everything I have on Linode earns me money in one way or another so they pay for themselves, I currently have 3 nodes for a total of $60 bucks a month, DO I could do the same for $15 but really $45 a month is nothing compared…

My experience (running ~7 machines in Linode's NJ datacenter) was that around once every two months I wake up with an email saying "we restarted server X due to emergency maintenance". It's not annoying enough to switch - yet. And EC2 has the wrong CPU/Memory ratio for me (too little CPU - Linode rocks here!).

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

#167

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…

Just install ufw. It's very simple to configure the rules for a basic server. Here's how: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-setup...

"ferm" is also a nice readable wrapper for iptables.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> however, try creating an EC2 instance without a publicly addressable IP. You can't access S3 at all from your VPC, which makes S3 not usable in many use cases. I don't see the problem with this. Either give your EC2 instance in your VPC a dedicated public IP and configure the security group to disallow all inbound connections, or use a public IP that routes all traffic for your VPC and again, secure it with a secur…

My use case is different. I want to put data into S3, but want it only accessible on my instances in the VPC, none of which I want to have access to the outside world. I realize many people probably don't have this particular need, however, I don't think it's completely unreasonable. Instead, I'm just mounting an EBS volume on an instance and running nginx to serve files.

> My use case is different. I want to put data into S3, but want it only accessible on my instances in the VPC, none of which I want to have access to the outside world.

Which you can still do, by using bucket policies/permissions in S3 (specifically EC2 IAM roles in this scenario).

I think we're arguing different use cases though. If your content is only used or getting served from one machine, EBS volumes. If you need to have it served to the world, available to multiple instances, etc, S3.

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

#169
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.

It would be good if you can elaborate your point and back it up otherwise just saying this doesn't inspire much confidence.

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

#170
DigitalOcean banned me because I was using their server to fetch chromium's source code so that I could git-bundle/rsync it's 12 GB mammoth of a repo and download it to the third-world country that I live in (my network connection is really bad even though it's the best money can buy). Apparently I violated their TOS. As long as they limit their TOS to such narrow purposes as hosting a wordpress site or doing straight-forward things, I don't think they'll get too far. With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game.

Good luck anyways.

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