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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

#291

Post by raiyu »

MichaelGG wrote: post #242
beachstartup wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So in that case DO receives a DMCA takedown, they comply, and let the customer deal with it? Or you're saying they file malicious lawsuits against the hosting provider and courts happily allow these suits to proceed and don't award fees to a neutral hosting provider?

We forward any abuse complaints that we receive to the owner of the account and ask that they handle them.

We try not to interpret the law as that is not our specialty of course, we are simply saying that we would like that customers use the service for a non-malicious purpose. But we're more than happy to open up a dialogue about this and make amendments if necessary.

Thanks!

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

#292

Post by raiyu »

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…

If an IP continuously receives abuse complaints it is blacklisted by various services which can then lead to mail undeliverability issues or other problems which is why we are very pro-active on any abuse complaints that we receive and forward them to customers.

In regards to embarrassment it's about the intention of the statement which is to not use the service for a malicious nature. But we're more than happy to open up a dialogue about this and see if there are any amendments to the terms that are a good idea.

We'll push on getting more of our public content into github so that customers can provide feedback and provide rewrites of the terms that they feel capture the sentiment but perhaps clarify those terms better.

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

#293

Post by zx2c4 »

sn wrote: post #183
phaker wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Actually, I really would love to use prgmr. The thing is, the price point is super far from Digital Ocean. Compare https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ to http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html . The difference is a bit of a joke. If you're able to provide competitive pricing, I'd be thrilled though.

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

#294

Post by hackerboos »

t0mas88 wrote: post #116
samwillis wrote: post #31

I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice. I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and increased latency.

Rackspace Cloud has both persistent disks for VMs (on SSDs in RAID 10, so fast and reliable) and an S3 like storage system called Cloud Files. Sounds like that's the combination you want?

They do hourly billing as well which Linode is missing.

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

#295

Post by eli »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #231
madsushi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you need more with virtual hosting and SNI?

Why do you assume my customers have browsers that support SNI? About 10% are still running IE8.

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

#296

Post by rschmitty »

bananas wrote: post #244
rschmitty wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love having a static IP. sudo ufw allow from your.ip.addr to tcp port 22 Rest of the world doesnt know I have ssh up and if I'm ever in a hotel or something I can tunnel through my home or login to DO's panel and allow another ip

Don't do that. I did that once and our static ip changed suddenly despite lots of money being spent on it. That was a painful day driving from London to Manchester for me to get to the console.

There is a web console, you never have to drive... or worry :)

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

#297

Post by robogrowth »

shortavion wrote: post #280
robogrowth wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for envy, get some land and go to work! It's wonderful. Getting ready to tap our Vermont Sugar Maples for a bit of spring maple sugar production... Nothing like old time, home made, boiled over a open fire, Vermont Maple Syrup!

Are you blogging about it? I have often thought of doing this but not really sure about the aspects of it.

Ive been thinking about it..

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

#298

Post by bmelton »

singingcheese wrote: post #237
bmelton wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are correct, that is what I meant, but I've taken to calling it 'rebooting' because all the intro-to-EC2 stuff I've seen listed their "how to reboot the instance" instructions as stopping and starting it, so I figured it's the appropriate vernacular, however incorrect it might otherwise be.

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

#299

Post by lsc »

zx2c4 wrote: post #293
sn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, I really would love to use prgmr. The thing is, the price point is super far from Digital Ocean. Compare https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ to http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html . The difference is a bit of a joke. If you're able to provide competitive pricing, I'd be thrilled though.

Yeah, I'm working on it. I announced upgrades to some of my customers several years back, and failed to deliver many of said upgrades, so I'm not going to give hard dates... but I recognize that competitive pricing is a prerequisite to the survival of the company, and I'm working towards that end.

As is industry standard, I'm upgrading existing customers (e.g. they stay on the same price plan, but they get more resources) before I offer those new price plans to the general public. I have maybe... 1/3rd of my customers upgraded to the plan I promised several years back (that has more disk and less ram than the plan I am upgrading to now.)

A big part of the problem is that I made a huge business mistake a year ago that cost me most of the money I would have used for upgrades. But, I've got a few options on the table, one of which is just consulting for a while;

if I go with used hardware, I'm within $50K of having enough hardware to upgrade everyone to "competitive, but not great" pricing. - that's maybe 3 months of full-time contracting work. Completely reasonable. Of course, used hardware is a lot like 'technical debt' - pay me now or pay me later, but it might make sense, just to get the monkey off my back. (That, and dealing with hardware problems is part of my core skillset; I can probably eek more reliability out of used garbage than most companies can.)

I'm talking 2-3x that for new hardware, which is a lot less realistic without some sort of loan or lease, something I should look into, but eh. I am thinking that used hardware until I'm competitive, then start buying new hardware once I start getting new customers on board might be the best way to go. The company is vastly easier to run when it's slowly growing rather than slowly shrinking.

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