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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

#21

Post by ycombasks »

coreymgilmore wrote: post #19

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?

I wish they could address these issues: http://www.redbottledesign.com/blog/five-reasons-why-you-sho...

I think "There's no way to increase storage space without major down-time" is the most important one. One hour of downtime is no good for production.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by tim333 »

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…

In my case DO succeeded more through the product than the marketing. I signed up after reading several 'who's the best hosting service' discussions and the consensus was DO was the best for small developer stuff, Linode and AWS being sometimes better for larger stuff. I've never seen an ad for DO. It's all been user recommendation.

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

#25

Post by joshmn »

DigitalOcean is not a cloud or anything that resembles what a "cloud" is.

If you consider "cloud" hosting backup-enabled virtual private servers with multiple operating-system choices and multiple locations, well, hate to break it to you, but that's has been around since 2005.

Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other than that, there's really nothing special about it.

Source: me; hosting-industry expert.

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

#26

Post by dmourati »

Nux wrote: post #14
jonesetc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I actually think they are right. If you are not AWS (Google or Microsoft), and you are not embracing OpenStack, you are an also ran and you will be irrelevant.

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

#27

Post by btgeekboy »

ycombasks wrote: post #21
coreymgilmore wrote: post #19

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?

I wish they could address these issues: http://www.redbottledesign.com/blog/five-reasons-why-you-sho... I think "There's no way to increase storage space without major down-time" is the most important one. One hour of downtime is no good for production.

For what it's worth, #4 is a moot point: DO has said that they're not currently billing for bandwidth overages.[1]

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/where-can-i... (Kamal Nasser February 13, 2014)

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

#28

Post by priyankt »

My opinion. I am a DO user and I don't think you can use it for production application. Casual hosting is fine.

For production servers, deterministic backups are very important. DO does not provide that. I faced a lot of issues when transitioning my server from non-backup to backup mode. To do that, you need to take a snapshot(server shutdown is required for this)of server. Then, you need to destroy it to get the same ip. There is a chance that your ip may go to someone else & any services that are dependent on ip may need changes. I was lucky to loose the ip for a while & get it back after some trial & error.

Also, you don't have any control on the backup. It is taken by the system and is supposed to be anywhere between 2-3 days.

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

#29

Post by gaadd33 »

Nux wrote: post #14
jonesetc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does Digital Ocean's "cloud" offer all the same things that OpenStack does? I've been looking for another file storage provider (like S3/CloudFiles/Azure Files) but wasn't aware there were any other options than OpenStack based.

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

#30

Post by donniezazen »

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…

That seems so now a days. Folks like easy things. Plain and simple.
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