DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by mikehearn » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

fuzzix wrote: post #75

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…

Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either. https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ An odd experience, I would say.

I wish we wouldn't upvote stuff like this. The guy clearly bullied a random Google employee in a private chatroom into commenting on a subject that was totally irrelevant to his work, and then turned his comments into a biased character assassination post WITHOUT even telling the dude he was writing about him.

It sure seems like the author went into the chatroom looking for a story, and got the THINNEST of all possible stories ("Random Google Developer Has Opinions") and, in an effort to turn it into real news, colored it in the most negative way possible. It is profoundly terrible journalism, and the motives behind it are so ugly. This is not something that we should endorse on Hacker News.

The only story of relevance here is that Digital Ocean has a line in its TOS about not allowing "harassment or embarrassment", and they will enforce it if you do indeed harass a guy.

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

#182

Post by hnnewguy » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

mikehearn wrote: post #181

fuzzix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either. https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ An odd experience, I would say.

I wish we wouldn't upvote stuff like this. The guy clearly bullied a random Google employee in a private chatroom into commenting on a subject that was totally irrelevant to his work, and then turned his comments into a biased character assassination post WITHOUT even telling the dude he was writing about him. It sure seems like the author went into the chatroom looking for a story, and got the THINNEST of all possib…

>The only story of relevance here is that Digital Ocean has a line in its TOS about not allowing "harassment or embarrassment", and they will enforce it if you do indeed harass a guy.

I think you are missing the real relevance here; that DO will use their own discretion to determine if your content is worthy of dissemination. You're right, it was terrible journalism, and a thin story. So what of it? Why should DO concern themselves with the content that isn't breaking any laws? What, precisely, is "embarrassment"? It was a no-name blogger posting a non-story.

>This is not something that we should endorse on Hacker News.

The fact that you say this explains a lot about why you have your opinion on DO and how things should work, and why I have mine. If this story is getting upvoted, it's getting upvoted. There is no "we", unless you're trying to curate opinion and create an echo chamber.

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

#183

Post by sn » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:44 PM UTC

phaker wrote: post #124

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…

> update packages and the kernel PSA: If you just update the kernel using system tools within the instance, it'll still boot the old one. (At least it did few months ago.) The grub (or other bootloader) and kernels that are installed inside the instance's disk image are silently ignored and the vm uses a kernel stored outside of your instance's image. You can select which kernel image you want to boot in the control…

Second shameless plug on this page: if running your own linux kernel or BSD is really important to you, http://prgmr.com can do that and we have out of band console access so you can debug why it's not working (I was having problems with that when I was checking whether some linux+xen bugs were also present on ec2.)

At this time we only support xen paravirtualization(PV) though, which almost, but not quite, all major distributions have. Notably we can't run 64-bit freebsd right now because they only have HVM support. I'd like to change that but it needs more testing first. Here is a partial list of distributions supporting xen: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/DomU_Support_for_Xen Really any linux distribution with a modern kernel can be made to support it though as support has been in mainline for a long time now.

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

#184

Post by ilaksh » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple.

The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers.

The thing is with that much funding it doesn't really matter if their income is greater than expenses. They can continue for at least another few years regardless. During that time sane people who just need a VPS will take advantage of it.

My recommendation for DO's business model is simply to set a precedent and make it a policy that if you pay only $5 then you don't get any kind of free support. That is the only real cost that sticks. So I suggest having a few different monthly support options available starting at zero support for $0 and up. That is the main business issue a provider like this has is the conflict between the desire to provide good support and the need to keep unit costs low. And the solution is to separate support out. The main challenge to doing that is sort of a cultural/expectations/marketing issue.

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

#185

Post by canadev » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:48 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #184

Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple. The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers. The thing is w…

I suspect they make a fair bit of money from people like me, who are lazy and/or have full-time jobs, and have commissioned a server or three and never actually use them.

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

#186

Post by drone » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:48 PM UTC

oijaf888 wrote: post #180

drone wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-employment tax covers K-1 distributions, etc. If you're inactive (not actually working for the pass-through entity, only receiving profit distributions) your taxes are additionally higher on those distributions. In summary: typical pass-through entity distributions are typically taxed as self-employment income and subject to the SET which attempts to recover the missing employer's half of tax payments. You c…

Interesting, that's contrary to what I've heard from multiple sources (and pretty much all literature about the subject that I can find) about S-Corp distributions (again assuming you are being paid a market salary that you would hire someone at to perform similar tasks).

"If you have a pass through entity of some sort (S corp, LLC, etc) you can avoid paying payroll taxes on distributions and also avoid double taxation."

What you're talking about does not apply to LLCs, it is a special situation only related to S-Corps. Generally speaking, pass-throughs such as LLCs all distributions are taxed as self-employment wages, except under certain conditions.

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

#187

Post by raiyu » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:53 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #155

fuzzix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either. https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ An odd experience, I would say.

Regardless of the truthiness of this blogpost, their ToS actually includes this gem (repeated twice actually, due to poor editing): 3.13 Subscribers may not use the Services in a manner that would violate the lawful privacy rights of any person, ... or embarrass, which shall be determined in DigitalOcean’s sole and absolute discretion. So... if someone gets embarrassed by what you put up, DO just decides to take it d…

We try to provide the best cloud experience possible and part of that is following up on abuse complaints, otherwise we end up with blacklisted IPs and other issues that impact customer service.

There are occasional weird situations like this that come up and I would love to handle every support request directly but unfortunately that's not possible.

We've had to scale the support team to support over 100,000 customers and we didn't get the right customer support director on board till about 2 months ago.

We are constantly looking to improve our service in all areas and Zach is on top of it to ensure that all of our customer support staff get more training in how to better respond to customers.

However, the promise that I make is that if any situation ever arises in any way shape or form with DigitalOcean please contact me directly - moisey --- a-t --- digital0cean - and I will be on top of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps in response to this issue.

Thanks, Moisey

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

#188

Post by raiyu » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:57 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #184

Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple. The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers. The thing is w…

Thanks for the great question. We are actually profitable on every virtual server that we sell.

The reason we raised our seed round is that our growth began to outstrip our ability to acquire hardware and grow the business at the rate at which our customers were spinning up more droplets.

The second round that we raised was again for the same reason. Growth has been completely unbelievable and we are humbled by the support that the community has given us. We thought that our initial Seed round would certainly be enough to cover our growth but quickly saw that growth was actually increasing so we made the decision to raise a second round in a rather short period of time.

We were immediately impressed by Peter Levine's knowledge of the space and we are super excited about having a16z on board as our partners. This round has certainly provided ample funding for us to continue to expand not worry that our growth is going to outstrip our ability to finance it.

Thanks, Moisey

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

#189

Post by btgeekboy » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:58 PM UTC

dmunoz wrote: post #117

Only tangentially related, but when did DigitalOcean redesign their website? I think my initial dislike is due to it being changed, but there are tons of minor usability issues that I never noticed on their old website. I'm happy to see a view for new articles in the tutorials database [0], but at the moment it doesn't make any sense. When I hit it just now, an article from 11 minutes ago is above an article from 1 m…

> when did DigitalOcean redesign their website?

Must have been very recent; I was on it just the other day with the old design.

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

#190

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 10:01 PM UTC

TheSwordsman wrote: post #149

exratione wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they have issues with IPs having been blacklisted. I ran into that in connection with MIPSpace. Large swathes of DO IPs are blacklisted by MIPSpace, which impacts my deliverability for a small double opt-in hobby list. - Digital Ocean says they can't get MIPSpace to remove IPs. - MIPSpace will only deal with me if I can get DO to add rwhois/SWIP for my IP - Digital Ocean doesn't offer that feature (of course). S…

MIPSpace is stupid if they think you can get SWIP from DO. This is not DO's policy, but the RIR. I seem to remember that for ARIN you need a /30 or larger of consecutive IP address space to qualify for SWIP. This may even be a /28. So while DO is saying no, I'm wondering if it's because they don't offer the space required to SWIP the ranges. In addition to not offering the size, it would incur additional administrati…

According to https://www.arin.net/resources/request/reassignments.html it's actually mandatory to provide whois tracking for assignments /29 or shorter prefix, and optional for /30 or longer prefix. I can't find any reason they wouldn't be able to provide it if they wanted to.

Edit: definitely possible http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/12406/which-providers-provi...

So you shouldn't call MIPSpace stupid, thanks.