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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#61

Post by pbreit »

dharma1 wrote: post #56
crazygringo wrote: post #11

To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…

competitive advantage compared to Linode - SSD drives, cheaper. That's it. Start process on Linode is just as easy and docs are as good or better, DNS support is there etc.

Half price and SSDs are pretty compelling advantage.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#62

Post by jcampbell1 »

nathancahill wrote: post #47
mberning wrote: post #14

I tried them out a few months ago looking to move my infrastructure from AWS to DO. I was experiencing terrible IO performance on a fairly expensive instance. Submitted a support ticket about it. Their response was 'this is normal'. Killed all my droplets and canceled my account the next day. To me they are running a pretty transparent pump and dump scheme. Promise a great service, sell it at a loss, get a ton of use…

They were having SERIOUS issues a few months ago. I had been scaling up to around $600/month in droplets, and almost canceled and walked away. The IO was horrible, packet loss was massive and droplets were crashing all the time. Fortunately, they've gotten much better again and I haven't had a single issue in 3 months. I think they got really popular suddenly and couldn't handle the explosive growth.

I created a droplet that I was going to use for the production site. It is currently sitting in a totally crashed state. I have no idea when it crashed, or why, I just know it happened some time in the past month.

I am now nervous about moving to them.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#63

Post by MicroBerto »

mberning wrote: post #53
MicroBerto wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My benchmarks (and real world usage with a database I rough up pretty badly) say you're wrong. So do most blog posts reviewing DO out there as well. Give it another shot, or document exactly what you did and I'm sure someone will figure out the issue.

Thank you for telling me about my own personal experience which you know nothing about. I guess if it didn't happen to you personally then it just didn't happen, right?

LOL, I have no dog in the fight. I just think that if you're going to call something a "pump and dump scheme" that gave you "terrible IO performance" when practically nobody else has such issues, you might want to add a bit more information. Maybe try helping someone who has your similar conditions where DO is not the best way to go.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#64

Post by [deleted] »

mberning wrote: post #59
eli wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's saying your personal experience is wrong, just your extrapolation to "this is a pump & dump scheme"

That their support organization does not care about actually supporting the product is very telling to me. Especially when you have somebody willing to spend $160/mo or more and you basically tell them to 'go away'.

[deleted]

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#65

Post by mintplant »

mberning wrote: post #53
MicroBerto wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My benchmarks (and real world usage with a database I rough up pretty badly) say you're wrong. So do most blog posts reviewing DO out there as well. Give it another shot, or document exactly what you did and I'm sure someone will figure out the issue.

Thank you for telling me about my own personal experience which you know nothing about. I guess if it didn't happen to you personally then it just didn't happen, right?

Why is your particular anecdote worth more than everyone else's?

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#66

Post by talkingquickly »

MicroBerto wrote: post #41
[deleted] wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Yeah. For me it was price and performance, both of which DigitalOcean wins. I couldn't possibly care less about an admin panel. I'm a Linux guy. I want cheap speed and reliability. With DO, you get all of them. Sorry Linode, but you're old news now.

I've got a fair bit running on both DO and Linode. Fairly happy with both but still for anything CPU bound (to me the speed part of that), Linode is substantially outperforming DO still and both leave Rackspace Cloud in the dust.

So for me, on average a $20 Linode has less RAM but performs better for CPU bound tasks than a $20 DO Droplet.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#67

Post by mikeash »

crazygringo wrote: post #11

To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…

I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill.

Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#68

Post by mgkimsal »

mikeash wrote: post #67
crazygringo wrote: post #11

To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean…

I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill. Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.

heaven help you if you manage to start an instance that has n permanent storage then reboot it. apparently that's the default, and you need to (imo) go out of your way to get permanent storage. I understand the use case for the former, but the UI and docs for the latter use case were, last I looked, pretty difficult to grok.

Yeah, AWS has some functionality/scaling features that DO and Linode don't, but it's a smaller set of functionality than I think some people initially assume.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#69

Post by bduerst »

davexunit wrote: post #46

I currently use digitalocean for my blog, but I was recently pointed towards this article which concerns me greatly: https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean... If I cannot have freedom of speech on my blog, I will have to find a new provider that respects my freedom.

That's a bit of a stretch, even for equivocation.

Did you read the article in question? http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks...

It took four comments, out of context, and made it into a slam. Bias of the rant aside, DO says that it was because of a TOS violation on privacy and defamation. It comes pretty close to outing where the person lives, what websites they run, and certainly makes plenty of assumptions about the four comments.

It reads like someone bitter lost an internet argument when they couldn't bait the employee into saying something incriminating, and they wanted revenge.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#70

Post by dnissley »

unethical_ban wrote: post #28

Seems no one here so far has mentioned Rackspace. Let's start by saying that DO has fewer features for a complex deployment: No load balancing, no private subnets, (IIRC) no IPv6 at the moment. No "cloud files" or S3 equivalent, the scaling isn't as automatic as RAX or AWS can provide. DO can't host Windows (which still matters for many existing operations, don't fool yourself). RAX gives more information and granula…

> RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength

I don't see this on their site (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/). Minimum pricing there is $29.20/mo for a 1gb instance.

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