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Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

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Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#11

Post by jonesetc »

Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

> or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!)

Maybe I misread the tone of this post or I'm fuzzy on the history, but it sounds like you're saying Rackspace is trying to be hip by jumping on the hype-train. My understanding is that Rackspace co-created [1] Openstack and let it out into the wild.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#12

Post by alien3d »

giulianob wrote: post #10
Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

I think at the end it came down to price. No one else was offering SSDs at the time for that cheap. Sure you get what you pay for but for a lot of people I guess it's good enough.

Yes.because it cheap and i want to test ssd. I want to test how include or require in php can be speed up.

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#13

Post by mbesto »

Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

Totally agree.

People who are going to argue against you are going to say "But what about products that are so great that they go viral, people share them and your customer acquisition goes through the roof!". This is marketing. Making frictionless experiences that satisfy needs very quickly is a great way to market your product. Note - Many of these experiences are frictionless because the security sucks. Security is accessibility's worst nightmare.

WhatsApp did this by making it easy for my parents living in the US to download the app, add my UK phone number and voila, I can IM them for free.

DO did this by making the interface on a VPS provider "not suck" and the pricing in line with all of the junk shared providers out there.

What I've noticed about "Bubble 2.0" is that making great, frictionless products is the new marketing. It is still marketing, and I feel it's best that people recognize it then pretend it simply doesn't exist.

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#14

Post by Nux »

jonesetc wrote: post #11
Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

> or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) Maybe I misread the tone of this post or I'm fuzzy on the history, but it sounds like you're saying Rackspace is trying to be hip by jumping on the hype-train. My understanding is that Rackspace co-created [1] Openstack and let it out into the wild. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History

What I meant is Rackspace (also RedHat, HP, Mirantis etc) would have you believe that if you're not running Openstack then your "cloud" is shit and has no future. DO clearly demonstrated otherwise.

They're inflating the hype because they generate $$$ this way - from their public cloud, private deployments, training, certifications etc etc. Nothing wrong with that I guess, it's business.

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#16

Post by stormbrew »

Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche.

In fact, part of the appeal may be that they don't use openstack, because openstack implementations to date have all been quite limited and complicated so far.

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#17

Post by straws »

mbesto wrote: post #13
Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

Totally agree. People who are going to argue against you are going to say "But what about products that are so great that they go viral, people share them and your customer acquisition goes through the roof!". This is marketing. Making frictionless experiences that satisfy needs very quickly is a great way to market your product. Note - Many of these experiences are frictionless because the security sucks. Security i…

If this kind of "marketing" is truly the thing you overlook when making things, are you making valuable tools that are hard or frustrating to use? What are the parts of your products that have nothing to do with the friction in using them?

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#18

Post by hyp0 »

stormbrew wrote: post #16
Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche. In fact, part of the appeal may…

Yes. Two parts of business: engineering and marketing.

Two parts of marketing: promotion and meeting needs.

The key "marketing" of DO was:

  Existing providers offered pricing plans that were too complicated and platforms
  that weren’t always meeting the needs of their users.
It's not enough to make a "better" product, technically. You have to make a product that better meets user needs (relative to existing alternatives).

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#19

Post by coreymgilmore »

DO really is a tremendous product. The simplicity, pricing, and speed of setting up an instance is awesome. For setting up a quick dev environment or a simple host for X or Y, it is definitely easier than through AWS.

I use DO pretty often and I hope they have some cool new offerings in the future. Maybe really simple load balancing?

Re: Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

#20

Post by redwall_hp »

stormbrew wrote: post #16
Nux wrote: post #7

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff. You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud stand…

I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche. In fact, part of the appeal may…

For me, it's all the pricing-reputability ratio. They've always seemed like a stand-up company, while offering a comparable product to Linode and similar...at a fraction of the price.

I jumped over to them around the time NewsBlur wrote that post about scaling to meet the new demand when Google Reader shut down. I had never heard of DO before that, checked them out, and made a the switch after a bit of research.

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