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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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this want me to give up programming and take up farming.

why not do both? I program, and have a small self sustaining micro farm. Just placed my order for 28 spring chickens, and 3 turkey's which will provide most of the meat for my family throughout the winter. I will supliment with fish and meat that I catch or hunt down. I also have a vegitable garden which we can most of our food from or preserve in other ways. :) If I want a chicken that tastes just as good as the one…

I feel like you can say anything on HN and there will be someone who is doing it and can evangelize it. Let's try an experiment:

"I wonder if anyone has ever tried to run a startup out of a cave..."

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

#252
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried denyhosts?

I've always been installing denyhosts but I have not compared the two.

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

#253
post #64
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…

It took me about an hour to put all of this into an ansible playbook. I think there are couple of examples out on blogs about this as well. If there is interest I'll share my playbook. Writing this playbook paid off already for the second installation of the box.

I remembered correctly, someone had already done that: http://lattejed.com/first-five-and-a-half-minutes-on-a-serve...

Shameless plug: a small side project I did with my team at nodeSWAT [1]: CMify [2] - a web service to easily generate your ansible playbooks. Somewhat naive so far, if there is interest we'll extend it.

[1] http://nodeswat.com [2] https://cmify.com

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

#255

Do they have IPv6 yet? What about actual security too? Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player? ( https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ ) Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'. That's just stupid. Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price gouging).…

News story about a cloud hosting provider?

Here's some dissenting opinions about them. Half of them have some sort of merit.

Disclosure: I have a vested interest in their direct competitor.

Seriously, man? You point out some valid things but this post doesn't really serve a purpose.

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

#256

Do they have IPv6 yet? What about actual security too? Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player? ( https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ ) Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'. That's just stupid. Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price gouging).…

News story about a cloud hosting provider? Here's some dissenting opinions about them. Half of them have some sort of merit. Disclosure: I have a vested interest in their direct competitor. Seriously, man? You point out some valid things but this post doesn't really serve a purpose.

No IPv6 is fairly serious. As is censorship to the point I wouldn't feel comfortable using them in case I angered Big Google at some point. Their general lack of HA and resource shortages make them look like amateurs.

So what if I use Linode? I don't work for them. I use two other providers as well. My 'vested interest' in them is limited to my VPS there running. I don't get a discount for pointing out DO sucks and Linode don't ban me if I speak ill of someone they like.

PS. Is a VPS host really a 'cloud hosting provider'? That term makes me think of overpriced individual services that aren't a self contained system, like AWS/EBS/their hosted databases.

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

#257
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'm surprised you say that you pick them over Linode, because Linode seems to have the features you mentioned were missing at Digital Ocean.

Three things put me off Linode:

1. Dependency on ColdFusion. Seriously that product is dead, poorly maintained and powers the entire front end. That's scary. Even more scary than PHP written by outsources from Elbonia. They got hacked due to this.

2. Billing system is take then refund credit rather than billing afterwards.

3. From my location their latency and throughput sucked even in their EU DC despite being only 11 miles from my house.

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

#258
post #75
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.

How are they buddies? That's not evident and there's no trace of "golf" mentioned anywhere.

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

#259
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

When you say shutdown are talking about issuing commands from the command line like 'shutdown now' or 'reboot'? Because with Digital Ocean you DO NOT lose your data when you issue those commands. I know from experience.

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

#260
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fail2ban is based on the horribly flawed premise of correctly parsing arbitrary text logs from tons of different programs that wrote their log format without any concerns about parsing that output later. Not surprisingly there have been numerous vulnerabilities in fail2ban that let an attacker ban arbitrary hosts such as your DNS server, database, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fail2ban+dos+bug

A better approach is something like pam_abl which is a pam module that will accomplish mostly the same thing but only for login attempts and without the crappy plain text log parsing.

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