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

#211

Post by beachstartup » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 1:45 AM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #201

raiyu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, witho…

celebrity photos are huge, huge business. sites pop up all the time trying to monetize papparazzi shots and hosting providers have to deal with all sorts of fallout from anyone with a vested interested in the intellectual property or famous name.

these people do not give a shit about the streisand effect. they are going after their money.

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

#212

Post by aduth » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 1:55 AM UTC

wting wrote: post #162

beachstartup wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've found that more often than not, this is because those who are constrained to smaller budgets tend to be personally invested in the success of their business where return on investment is of critical importance (i.e. small business owners).

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

#213

Post by shirkey » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:10 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #125

z92 wrote: post #50

I am running these services in a $5/month DO droplet: dns [named], ntpd, httpd [apache], smtp [postfix], imap [dovecot], webmail [roundcube], vpn [pptpd]. It's taking 350MB off 500MB RAM. Now after adding getmail to back up gmail I am now wondering what more I can do with it.

I tried installing postfix/dovecot but couldn't do it. Any recent tutorials I could try?

Had you tried this tutorial?

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-u...

I had used it to setup a test server and had no issues -- FYI, the date on the article is today, but the original article has been available for a few months so perhaps the article has been updated.

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

#214

Post by shirkey » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:15 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #95

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #90

I use them for remote DC's (assia, EU, etc.) at $5 each. Only their billing is a hot mess, mostly because they think it works and their customers are wrongly entering the CC #. For 4 months now, same problem and they have off-shore support that reads scripted answers. They just read the closest answer related to billing.

Remote domain controllers ? (Sorry, I'm missing something here, I think)

Probably "remote data centers" in this context

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

#215

Post by mattbee » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:15 AM UTC

bananas wrote: post #146

verelo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy, but do you think filling these issues are probably part of why they're raising funding? Getting ahead takes capital and i'm sure they're aware of what makes them inferior, you can't raise $37m without a good story on how you're going to use it to get ahead and win.

No because hosts on 1/10th of the budget are doing these things already. I have great hope for http://bigv.io but they're not quite there yet.

Thanks dude, working on it and I'm really happy with the core after two years of building and testing. We've just finished building our own data centre, a nice steady influx of customers are buoying us up, and we recently hired two new developers to fix up our various front-ends. It's definitely looking more presentable by the week.

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

#216

Post by nknighthb » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:45 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #131

oinksoft wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use that over iptables? It's simple and doesn't require installing a package. > There is a lot of functionality built into these > utilities, iptables being the most popular nowadays, but > they require a decent effort on behalf of the user to > learn and understand them. Is that a corner worth cutting?

iptables is powerful but definitely not simple. Simple is being able to simply say " allow all outgoing traffic and incoming traffic should only be allowed for HTTP(S) and SSH " and being able to figure out how to do it by just invoking "ufw --help". Maybe someday I'll learn about iptables, I'm sure it's going to be worth it, but for now ufw does the job for me.

> iptables is powerful but definitely not simple.

> Maybe someday I'll learn about iptables

Hmm...

    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ALLOW
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ALLOW
    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ALLOW
    iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -j ALLOW
    iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -j DROP

So complicated...

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

#217

Post by gregpilling » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 4:02 AM UTC

I am reading Ben Horowitz's book, and it is interesting to me that they made an investment into the same field as LoudCloud 15 years ago. Maybe they were just before their time.

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

#218

Post by jcampbell1 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 4:08 AM UTC

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.

I really appreciate your comment. I feel really dumb for not knowing that. I always assumed the worst. Want to reboot and instance to just check the init process?... can't do that on Amazon. I'll pick a different platform. I was way off base.

That being said, do they dump your instance if they reboot the physical server? I was under the impression that "Oh we want to upgrade they hypervisor kernel, your instance is toast", was fairgame/default on Amazon.

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

#219

Post by ksec » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 4:13 AM UTC

Let's hope DO finally get their act together.

No Pooled Bandwidth Networking and Route, as well as capacity need some work. Linode is much better in this regards. No Custom Kernels IPs Problem. Still no deploy to different physical hardware by default. No Private Networking on most of its DC.

And possibly many other small things i didn't mention. To me most of those are deal breaker. And my problems with them is that are not fixing or improving these problem quickly enough.

While Linode's SSD are quickly approaching, and has none of those drawbacks.

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

#220

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 4:30 AM UTC

jcampbell1 wrote: post #218

aluskuiuc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really appreciate your comment. I feel really dumb for not knowing that. I always assumed the worst. Want to reboot and instance to just check the init process?... can't do that on Amazon. I'll pick a different platform. I was way off base. That being said, do they dump your instance if they reboot the physical server? I was under the impression that "Oh we want to upgrade they hypervisor kernel, your instance is t…

> That being said, do they dump your instance if they reboot the physical server? I was under the impression that "Oh we want to upgrade they hypervisor kernel, your instance is toast", was fairgame/default on Amazon.

Nope. In most cases, you get two weeks warning before a physical host is decommissioned. I've gotten as little as 24 hours (guessing it was a more significant than usual hardware issue).

When that happens, you can just stop the instance, then start it again. That moves it onto a new physical host. If you don't do it in the 14 days, Amazon does it automatically. No loss of data, and just a few minutes of downtime if your startup scripts are OK.