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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

#231

Post by toomuchtodo »

madsushi wrote: post #88
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…

* only have the option of 1 IP address per droplet (no plans to change)

Why do you need more with virtual hosting and SNI?

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

#232

Post by toomuchtodo »

stevekemp wrote: post #198
raiyu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I see from your site you're hiring for various positions, but currently all of those are listed as NY only. I spent seven happy years working remotely as a system administrator, for a company listed in some of these comments, and wonder if this is something you've ever considered? I know that payment issues and similar might complicate things, but I'm surprised there seem to be essentially zero remote-working positio…

I traded emails with Moisey previously, they're not open to remote work (and I wasn't willing to move to NY).

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

#233

Post by vacri »

barake wrote: post #91
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * can't resize or add storage This is a huge issue for us and we've wasted time with this.

Resizing is our #1 issue with DO. The current quick resize adds cores and RAM just fine, but it's a one way trip. It's not possible to shrink upsized instances like you can on Linode. On DO you can't even restore a snapshot or backup to a smaller instance size - you must rebuild from scratch. I guess the right way to handle this is a configuration management tool, but this is a real pain since there is only local sto…

a configuration management tool

Yes, this is vital, but it's still not going to help you maintain existing data. A config management tool isn't going to fill out your logs, for example.

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

#234

Post by toomuchtodo »

twistedpair wrote: post #39
recmend wrote: post #30

We run our infrastructure on both AWS and DigitalOcean. 1) DO consistently beats the price performance. 2) DO has simple pricing model --> No ondemand / reserved instances 3) AWS is more feature rich but DO continues to add new functionalities like private networking and new data centers

Must be nice to have your providers competing with each other. Everyone knows Bezos loves a good ole race to the bottom better than anyone. I suspect we'll see even steeper AWS price cuts this year in response.

S3 price cut was nice. The EBS storage price cut was even more extreme (and fantastic) going from 10 cents/GB to 5 cents/GB.

At Amazon's scale, you can make it up on volume.

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

#235

Post by singingcheese »

zibit wrote: post #208
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.

"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.

If you shut down your server you lose the data that was stored on the local drives, no different to DO. If you shut down your droplet on DO you lose the data stored on the local drives (in fact DO now scrubs the disks on shutdown after a recent security screw-up). The only difference is that most folk on AWS use EBS storage (something which DO still doesn't offer) which allows you to have drives which can continue to exist after your server is no more and allows you to attach more storage without getting a bigger server.

It's not rocket science:

instance = virtual server ("droplet" in DO speak)

terminate = shut down

ephemeral store = local disk

An EC2 instance is just a virtual server so anyone who knows Linux, Windows, BSD or even Solaris can "hit the ground running" there too.

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

#236

Post by derefr »

judk wrote: post #227
derefr wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

Of I post a BS blog post about how DO is way more secure and reliable and cost-effective than AWS, and how AWS is a ripoff scam, will DO take it down to stop be from embarasskng Jeff Bezos? Or are they exercising editorial discretion?

Again, I wasn't speaking at all on the issue at hand, because the issue isn't at hand. The article sucked too bad to let the issue be at hand.

All I was talking about is the meta-issue you brought up, of what HN as a community should or shouldn't "give air-time."

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

#237

Post by singingcheese »

bmelton wrote: post #71
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…

But there are a myriad of scenarios where booting to a AWS image, effectively a CD, is preferred. Having a non-writable filesystem is cool, where that non-writability allows for the saving of temp files and such, but if it were ever compromised, I would just reboot it, and it's exactly how it used to be. Even smarter, I would boot up another clean instance and take that one down, then remap the elastic IP to cut over…

A reboot doesn't cause you to lose data on your ephemeral storage. I think you mean "stopping" an instance and then "starting" it again (on another host), not rebooting it.

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

#238

Post by jcampbell1 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #220
jcampbell1 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happe…

You mean they copy the ephemeral disk over? Really?

Amazon should really advertise this, if that is the case. I was under the impression that Amazon couldn't be relied on as a VPS.

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

#239

Post by axaxs »

raiyu wrote: post #65
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…

Fwiw....I love your interface and simple pricing. However, IPv6 is a deal breaker so I left. I understand things get busy... the problem isn't that ipv6 isn't available, it's that you didn't/don't communicate it. This makes me hesitant to become a customer again...

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

#240

Post by aluskuiuc »

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…

Eh, don't feel dumb. I can't really claim it's totally unambiguous and not confusing. Rebooting the physical server should only reboot your instance.
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