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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

#201

Post by MichaelGG »

raiyu wrote: post #187
MichaelGG wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 custome…

Can you elaborate on "blacklisted IPs" for hosting content? For spam or compromised boxes, sure. For hosting a webpage that "embarrasses" someone?

At any rate, I have no way of knowing about this issue. It's just curious that DO would put embarrassment as a ToS violation. All sorts of stuff embarrasses all sorts of people. Might as well just put up "DO reserves the right to terminate your services, at any time, without reason."

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

#202

Post by mjn »

checker659 wrote: post #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 straigh…

> 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.

For smaller numbers of instances it's true that you can spawn whatever you want and use them for whatever you want, as long as you pay the stated rates. But for larger numbers of instances you do actually have to tell Amazon what you want them for, and your requested use-case "will be considered". You can't just spin up 1000 instances and pay the stated rate without getting prior authorization; the API will block new instances after a certain point. Here are the default instance limits: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...

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

#203

Post by mindcrime »

api wrote: post #136
iamtew wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving your SSH server away from port 22 and disabling password logins is also something you should consider doing. Small thing but at least then it doesn't shout "Hey I'm a *nix box with remote login enabled"

Is it actually likely that someone would brute force a password? I always install fail2ban, but it's more just to stop bots from filling up my logs with junk and eating my bandwidth/CPU. Unless you use dumb passwords, the odds are phenomenally low.

I'm not sure, but I've come around to realize that it's always worth installing and configuring fail2ban just for the reasons you mentioned, if nothing else. I have a demo server that, for a while, was being hammered so hard by ssh brute-force bots that it kept getting knocked offline. I installed fail2ban and no more problems since. I personally can't recommend fail2ban highly enough.

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

#204

Post by retr0h »

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…

I actually like the Linode guys. They have been around for quite some time, and solid as hell. They don't have all the hipster devs talking about them as much, but I think they are more viable than DO.

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

#205

Post by sneak »

middleclick wrote: post #169
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.

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

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/transparency-regar...

The lies are still up on their blog:

"At no time was customer data "leaked" between accounts. This would require that a user not scrub their volume after destroying their server; in this instance data would be recoverable and should be considered not sensitive."

For a long time, if you deleted a DO virtual machine, it would not delete your data by default, so that the next customer would receive it on the block device to be recovered.

When I pointed this out to them, after it caused me a few thousand USD in credits I had to issue to my customer (as I remediated DO leaking my customer's data (through my use of the service)), they maintained "there's no leak because we give you a checkbox".

There is absolutely no circumstance, checkbox or no, in which delivering my data on disk to another customer is okay.

After I made a huge stink about it, it ended up at the top of HN, and they switched to a sane default (scrubbing disks after a user deletes a VM). It shouldn't even be an option, but there it is.

Despite all of this, though, they continued to lie about the root cause: they were careless with their customers' data and trust.

It looks like they've hired some people who aren't dicks and have since updated the blog post with sanity. Nice to see, but still: be mindful of how these people conduct themselves.

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

#206

Post by derefr »

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…

I dug into this a while ago; I recall (but can't source at the moment) an eventual statement by the DO guys to the effect of:

1. their original "inject kernel into OS and boot from it that way" architecture was designed that way on purpose, so that users could downgrade kernels out-of-band as a way to rescue a bad upgrade;

2. but now they've got thousands of droplets configured that way, so switching architectures to something sensible will require either A. forcibly installing grub on, and restarting, every one of their nodes (not something people expect out of a VPS provider), or B. coming up with some sort of glue that can manage both the nodes expecting an injected kernel, and nodes that want to boot on their own, and providing a way to transition your nodes from one to the other.

Basically, it's a mess. A bit like the problems Heroku had with its Alpine stack.

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

#207

Post by logjammer »

gamblor956 wrote: post #133
logjammer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not how it works. Your salary is an expense for the company, paid before any corporate tax is paid, and thus reduces corporate tax. A company that has $10MM in revenue, and $10MM in salary expense will pay zero corporate income tax.

A company paying its owner $10mm in salary cannot deduct all $10 million. It could probably get away with paying a six-figure salary (fully deductible), but the rest would be re-characterized as a dividend and the underlying "salary" expense would not be deductible. At the numbers we're talking about in this hypothetical, the corporation would be treated as severely underreporting its tax liability--meaning the highe…

My point was that salaries are an expense taken before companies pay income tax, which was contrary to what the parent post guessed.

Reasonable salary guidelines are a completely different matter, and I never meant to suggest that a $10MM revenue company would have a single employee who made $10MM. That example is just some pedantic nonsense you made up so you could feel smart, while you were actually just a moron who misses the forest for the trees.

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

#208

Post by zibit »

aluskuiuc wrote: post #100
jcampbell1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the analogy. With EC2 you either lose your data when rebooting, or you have to use network storage (iSCSI) which has advantages and disadvantages. BTW, when I invest in a corporation, I do get double taxed. The profits are taxed at the highest possible income tax rate, then I pay 15% tax on the distribution of profits. Of course if I work for that corporation, I opt to take the "profits" as a bonus. I pay…

I'll pick this comment out of the many to reply to rather than spamming - you do not lose your data when you reboot an EC2 instance. Local ephemeral stores are retained unless you terminate or 'stop' your instance - but a reboot is just fine.

"Local ephemeral stores are retained unless you terminate your instance"

That sentence makes no sense to people with no AWS experience. But if you give someone with Linux experience secure shell access to a DigitalOcean server they can hit the ground running.

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

#209

Post by shirkey »

phaemon wrote: post #54
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…

Do: sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 22 sudo ufw enable Then you can just edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config the same as you would on OpenBSD.

Or:

  sudo ufw limit ssh
  sudo ufw enable
To automatically rate limit connections -- see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uncomplicated_Firewall#...

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

#210

Post by derefr »

hnnewguy wrote: post #182
mikehearn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

By accepting implicitly the facts presented by the article as facts, you are doing something called "privileging the hypothesis."

Say, for example, that there's an article about a "scientific study", claiming some strong conclusion (e.g. "pig hair cures diabetes.") The article goes on to say that the study has one data-point and no control-group (which is to say, basically, that it's an anecdote.)

To still even consider the study's conclusion as possibly true is to privilege the hypothesis. You didn't have any facts before. You don't have any facts after. And yet, your default has switched from "assume pig hair has no special properties whatsoever" to "assume pig hair maybe has something with a vaguely-medicinal use in it." You've updated on zero information.

Just as much as publicizing such a "study", it's irresponsible to put such journalism--sophistry, really--in front of other people, where it could possibly infect their defaults. Not everyone catches these things. Most people only read the first paragraph or two of things, and come away with impressions. These impressions, especially in the case of really bad journalism, can be directly opposed to the impressions they should have taken.

If we are a community here, then we should want to help one-another avoid bad journalism, and more importantly, avoid becoming swayed by whatever the bad journalism purports to report. We don't all need to think the same thing--but supporting a story just on the basis that other people support it, leads to pig hair being "signal-boosted" into notoriety.

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