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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

#41

Post by ohashi »

joshmn wrote: post #38
ohashi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. The marketing is good. The quality of the product is good. It's incredibly easy to get started with. The tech accelerator I don't think plays any factor. I searched my database and there are 24 mentions of Tech…

The marketing is false though. That would mean I can go ahead and market a Galaxy S6 as an Apple device and watch all the fanboys and teenage girls hop on. But of course I need pretty colors.

I measure what people are actually saying about them. People seem pretty happy. You can pontificate all you want, but I am looking at thousands of people's opinions on them, the consensus is that it's pretty good.

If your complaint is the marketing about 'cloud' is false, then cloud computing in general is a pretty ambiguous term. It's being used for things as simple as a VPS in the industry. It's pretty meaningless at this point, people will use it to market their products and I don't think they are wrong. I still couldn't tell you where the line is drawn and I've been around this business for ages.

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

#42

Post by rythie »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #8

I know that TechCrunch isn't interested in discussing any actually useful details of what made DO successful...but for me it came down to them doubling the RAM per instance and using SSDs in 01/2013, creating a collection of excellent sysadmin articles, and cheap/free backups and images.

I used slicehost, though when it became rackspace cloud it became way more complicated. The main draw for me was the $5/month pricing combined with a $50 voucher they gave for black friday and they use SSDs. Even with all those benefits there are still switching costs due to having to re-setup on the new host, though I imagine most of their growth is people starting new projects.

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

#43

Post by bananas »

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.

Agree with your assertion here. We've been approached by a couple of vendors to try and sell us OpenStack but it doesn't really buy us much.

DO is what we need, except self hosted and supporting windows.

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

#44

Post by jedrek »

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…

I use DO as a private little always-on server, I don't actually host anything worthwhile with them.

I signed up mostly because of the $5/month price and the $10 credit. That's half of what I pay for my main hosting account (over at WebFaction) and year, is about what a nice meal out costs. It's nice, quick enough for all my needs and took minutes to set up.

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

#45

Post by mjn »

gaadd33 wrote: post #29
Nux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Joyent has one as well (not OpenStack-based), with an interesting "integrated compute" option where you can send code to run over stored objects without spinning up an explicit compute instance: http://www.joyent.com/products/manta

I don't think DO offers any kind of a-la-carte cloud storage, though.

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

#46

Post by Nux »

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…

Yeah, I guess the line between marketing and technical is not very clear all the time.

Re Openstack, indeed it has failed the "VPS" market which is still going strong.

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

#48

Post by rschmitty »

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 #2 vote for this https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...

and

https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...

I don't think the time behind the scenes will ever be zero so I'd rather 100% be guaranteed not to lose my IP address. Spin up a new VM and assign prod-new the IP of prod-old similar to how you might do it with AWS Elastic IP

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

#49

Post by teekert »

I really loved DO, that is until they emailed me that my server had to be rebooted and I found it with all the config files being replaced by a bunch of @@@'s (I had to use the browser VNC to log in).

I asked them what had happened and if it can be fixed, they tell me to make a new droplet. I ask what will prevent this from happening again... no response...

Bye bye DO.

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

#50

Post by nl »

mjn wrote: post #45
gaadd33 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Joyent has one as well (not OpenStack-based), with an interesting "integrated compute" option where you can send code to run over stored objects without spinning up an explicit compute instance: http://www.joyent.com/products/manta I don't think DO offers any kind of a-la-carte cloud storage, though.

OpenStack is working on a "send the code to the data" thing too. That's what Rackspace bought ZeroVM for.

If you want to try very alpha code you can kinda get it working yourself now (I think - based on mailing list discussion anyway)

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