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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

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Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#171

Post by stevekemp »

digitalsushi wrote: post #54

I'm trying to find a VPS provider that can do IPv6 and multiple IPv4. Digital Ocean really surprised me in having no IPv6 offering. What really surprised me is that you can't get IPv6 on Amazon's EC2. You can get a v6 address for a load balancer, but that's surely not the same thing. Linode does actually almost fit the bill, except that they require manual authorization for an additional IPv4 addresses. So there's no…

Bytemark are a well-known UK hosting company, and they have their own cloudy/scalable setup at http://bigv.io/

Their legacy virtual machines, dedicated hosts, and the new cloud stuff all comes with native IPv6.

Good company, smart people. (Disclaimer I used to work for them.)

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#172

Post by res0nat0r »

broodbucket wrote: post #159
ilaksh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. So funny that people always say things like this, that the real reason is its simpler. Bullshit. The real reason is it is MUCH, MUCH cheaper. And it works. That's the reason I use it. I am an honest person though, so most people probably won't share the same viewpoint.

[citation needed] The extremely low barrier to entry isn't just price point. It's hard to say which is more important, but the simplicity difference between DO and competitors is greater than the price difference.

Linode seems to me to be simple enough, but more expensive.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#173

Post by mattmanser »

FireBeyond wrote: post #141
mattmanser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I look at rack space it looks phenomenally expensive. As far as I can tell it's 5 times the cost of digital ocean.

It does seem to be. We are relatively small, and admittedly have a whole bunch of data in S3, but aside from that, our $10K/mo at Rackspace (primarily VMs, some load balancing) is looking to go down to about $6K/month at AWS when we port across 40 or so VMs (then we also don't have to deal with $4K/mo of S3 data transfer, too).

See, I don't get why anyone doing that simply wouldn't just go dedicated.

You know you need it, so why pay a huggggeeeeeee premium and get relatively poor performance compared to dedicated for on demand VM services?

I get the impression a significantly smaller subset of people using AWS/Rackspace/Azure should actually be using them.

Obviously I know nothing about what you're doing, so it may be that you have a perfectly good use case.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#174

Post by davidw »

michaelt wrote: post #170
frisco wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually the most widely accepted mechanism for "disruptive" innovation. See: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

I thought "disruptive innovation" was things like car vs horse, e-mail vs postal mail etc - things that are fundamentally different, not an evolution of the existing market. AWS vs DO seems more like Ford vs Toyota than cars vs horses.

Sometimes the 'different' thing is inferior though - one of the examples in the cited book talks about excavators:

> An example that has nothing to do with “high tech” comes from the mechanical excavator industry. This industry was dominated by steam shovels until the 1920’s, when gasoline powered engines began to replace them. This was, however, not a disruptive innovation, but a sustaining one, even though the design of the machines changed radically from that of a steam-powered system of cables, to that of a gasoline engine driving a system to extend and retract the cable connected to the bucket. The new engines were more capable than the old ones, and were better at doing more work more reliably, and cheaper than the old system. Despite the radical change in the industry, the same firms that were strongest in steam shovels stayed on top. The disruptive change came with the introduction of hydraulic-actuated systems after World War II - a change that eliminated nearly all of the established players by about 1970, in favor of companies that entered the market with hydraulics. The first hydraulic-based excavators were less capable than the cable systems that were in existence, and certainly couldn’t compete with them. However, they were small enough that they could be deployed for jobs previously done by hand, opening up a new market, in which the desired attributes were quite different from the big jobs that the cable actuated excavators were used for. The technology involved in hydraulics continued to improve, however, and with time eventually equaled and then surpassed the needs formerly filled by cable-based systems. In the meantime, though, the established firms were still going strong, and didn’t do much, if anything, to deal with the new competitor (because it wasn’t really seen as a competitor, not being sufficient for their existing clients’ demands) until the new arrivals were “in the midst of their mainstream market”. By the time the established companies introduced their own hydraulics, however, it was too late, and the later entrants were by then better positioned with the new technology.

From http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma... - a site I sold on a few years ago.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#175

Post by dagw »

crassus wrote: post #167
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #95

If you are writing a Python, PHP, Go, or Java web app, I think using Google App Engine is the easiest way to get your app live. DigitalOcean is easy, but it still requires you to know a bare minimum of Linux-Fu. App Engine is just brain-dead easy. You literally execute a deploy script locally. And as an added bonus, if you use the Google datastore instead of their RDBS it should scale smoothly too.

It works until you want to use PIL or LXML and need to compile a python library with native extensions, or if you want to use a datastore other than google's. At least, you couldn't do those things a few years ago.

Your point about compiled python libraries is correct in principle, but it's worth pointing out the GAE python comes with PIL and LXML (and a bunch of other libraries) pre-installed these days:

See https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/li... for a complete list.

But,yea if you need a library that's not on that list and uses native extensions, then you're kind of screwed.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#176

Post by blueskin_ »

DigitalOcean need to get their technical side up to scratch. Still not having IPv6 at this point makes them a total joke, and the security issues around host keys and VM deletion seem amateurish. My main issue with them, and a reason I wouldn't use them even with the IPv6 issue fixed, however, is the censorship on-demand for the owners' friends.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#177

Post by davexunit »

bduerst wrote: post #148
dangrossman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take this to the extreme: you could shut down an innocent business that hosts on DigitalOcean by posting a threatening or defamatory comment on their blog, then making an abuse report. This puts them in the position of hosting such speech, and permits DO to cancel the service without recourse as a TOS violation. That's what you're OK with if you're OK with that being a term of the agreement. You point out that the…

True, that is an extreme. It seems like DO is willing to evaluate each case and give the blog host a chance to remedy the situation. Evidence thus far shows that they at least stick to their guns on the troll posts.

A VPS host should have no business censoring "trolls".

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#178

Post by 0- »

yeah they are growing, we noticed: my "ids" sensors grab malicious traffic originating from their ranges more frequently, compared to those originating from aws (which are plenty as well).

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#179

Post by raiyu »

tomsthumb wrote: post #162
enraged_camel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I really think the markets for DO and AWS are different. DO aims at the "I need a few boxes" sort of user, and AWS aims at the "I boxes and other infrastructure" where other infrastructure is databases, auto-scaling services, etc. This is the typical pattern for market disruption: competitor enters the market at the low-end and moves up-market to eventually dislodge the incumbent.

Is that really disruption though? It kinda just sounds like regular ol' business. I only ask because your comment is making me question my understanding of "disruption".

Thanks for the feedback, one thing to remember is that the other companies mentioned in this thread have had quite a few years to put their products and service together.

We spent most of last year dealing with the challenges of scale as we grow quite a bit.

There was the need to scale infrastructure, engineering, customer support, as well as the misc odds and ends of running a business (office space, etc.).

As we grew from 5 people to over 50 today that definitely slowed us down on our product roadmap substantially but now that we've scaled out most teams (and we're still hiring! =]) we are able to once again refocus our efforts on engineering.

That means more updates to the backend for stability and also rolling out new features. During the next couple of months customers should see the benefits of those efforts.

There are other challenges that come from scaling rapidly including making sure that we can retain our culture as new team members join. Aside from rolling out new features and diving into some of those we'll also be writing blog posts on the scale challenges we faced as a startup so that it hopefully provides some insights to other startups as they go through their growth phases as well.

As always if there are any questions please reach out to me direct - Moisey -- digitalocean.com - It may take me a day or two to respond depending on how much work is piled on top, but I always read every email and get back to everyone and we very much appreciate the feedback.

Thanks, Moisey - cofounder digitalocean

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#180

Post by eli »

api wrote: post #116
eli wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question: what do you use IPv6 for? What am I missing by not having it?

Unfortunately not much yet, but you're helping make way for the future. I say unfortunately because IPv4's limitations are going to hurt more and more as the Internet gets more hosts online.

Sure, I get that. And I agree that the lack of IPv6 makes me a teensy bit nervous about how well DO is planning for the future... but seems like a weird reason to completely disqualify an otherwise acceptable provider
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