Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

businesswire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#31

Post by andrewstuart2 »

imbriaco wrote: post #27
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think where they win is when somebody buys a $5/mo server and uses $0.50/mo worth of capacity. They shut down all the hardware they don't need and save the electricity costs.

We're growing so fast that shutting down hardware is the last thing we would ever do. We have the opposite problem -- it's quite challenging to provision hardware fast enough to keep up with demand. :)

Haha, that's surprising. I've heard lots of stories about load balancing VMs to certain corners of the datacenter so the rest can be shut down that I figured everybody had unused metal at least at some point during the day.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#32

Post by icelancer »

denis1 wrote: post #9
InclinedPlane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's money now in exchange for money in the future, vs money now in exchange for ownership.

Wouldn't this be a better deal than money in exchange for ownership? I mean, they get the money and still have control of the company.

Yes, but not all companies can raise $50mm on credit. Digital Ocean is already well-established. If you're a start-up, people aren't generally interested in investing X dollars at a small percentage return.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#33

Post by icelancer »

nonuby wrote: post #24
anewhnaccount wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Since the second half of 2012. Source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/andreessen-horowitz-b... They're hardly the only VPS provider offering that price point. (Although it's true, many of the others have a slightly fly-by-night look about them. But by no means all of them.)

Sadly 99.9% of the other companies are shitty solusvm customers who dont understand the hypervisors they are using, and completely fail to manage resources properly, resulting in retarded TOS such "a load average of more than 1.0 for more than 15 minutes" results in warning/suspension/ban. You'd be insane to trust any production stuff to retard kiddie hosts from LowEndBox or WHT.

Definitely. These are good for VPN/proxy endpoints in various geographic areas to test servers or get around restrictions and not much else. I use the cheap VPS boxes for backup static file hosting for my products, but I serve everything primarily off Amazon S3.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#34

Post by fredguth »

peterjancelis wrote: post #2

Maybe the title can mention that this 50 million is a credit facility, not equity funding.

Loan funding is still funding. In the startup world people think funding== equity funding, but that is not true. Equity funding is normally the most expensive kind of funding. Glad to see they can grow with loans instead.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#35

Post by xfalcox »

imbriaco wrote: post #27
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think where they win is when somebody buys a $5/mo server and uses $0.50/mo worth of capacity. They shut down all the hardware they don't need and save the electricity costs.

We're growing so fast that shutting down hardware is the last thing we would ever do. We have the opposite problem -- it's quite challenging to provision hardware fast enough to keep up with demand. :)

Any plans to offer VPSs on Brazil?

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#36

Post by gabemart »

tim333 wrote: post #16
butwhy wrote: post #8

It blows my mind that this is happening. Back in the day, there were a thousand cheapo VPS providers out there with similar rates. But DO were the ones to put up an extremely simplified interface to spinning up VMs and that has seen them skyrocket (I'm not saying this is a bad thing). At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooke…

I signed up for DO because they were $5/mo and at the time Linode was $20. Twenty bucks is fine for production but for hobbyist mucking about, which I would classify my usage as, it's a bit steep. I image many users are in a similar situation.

Linode still don't have a $5 offering. Linode's cheapest VPS is $10 per month on a 125Mbit port. DO's cheapest is $5 per month on a 1Gb port.

That difference is huge if you're doing high-bandwidth work and you run a ton of droplets.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#37

Post by Igglyboo »

butwhy wrote: post #8

It blows my mind that this is happening. Back in the day, there were a thousand cheapo VPS providers out there with similar rates. But DO were the ones to put up an extremely simplified interface to spinning up VMs and that has seen them skyrocket (I'm not saying this is a bad thing). At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooke…

Why is Linode so much better? I got a bunch of free credit for DO and I'm only using it for small things so I went with them, thinking about spinning up larger projects however and would like to look at my options.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#38

Post by tptacek »

butwhy wrote: post #19
coding4all wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Linode have a really bad security record?

They've been hit with a coldfusion 0day in the past, but the stuff that has happened to them could happen to anyone. I wouldn't have much to critique about their security practices.

That's incorrect along a couple different axes. The biggest problem is, most providers wouldn't be hosting ColdFusion code at all; ColdFusion is archaic and has a terrible security track record. But even if they'd built that UI in Scala, the onus is on the hosting provider to make sure the code is safe.

Being a hosting provider is a big, big deal. They have less margin for security errors than almost any kind of tech company.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#39

Post by paukiatwee »

Recently one of my production node landed on a bad physical host, DO reboot my node twice within 24 hours, I tweeted about it and DO support open a ticket for me.

Since the physical node have problem, I plan to take snapshot then spin up a new node using the image. However, as the physical node have problem, the snapshot take more than 7 hours and still failed to snapshot (No way to cancel snapshot task).

DO support told me the snapshot is running, but I seriously think their support not honest about it and I ask they provide proof to show the snapshot is moving, they failed to do so. (From UI I can see JSON response show progress stuck at 3%, they lied)

Yesterday, DO reboot again my node.

Just my two cent, never ever use DO for serious production usage.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#40

Post by adventured »

Igglyboo wrote: post #37
butwhy wrote: post #8

It blows my mind that this is happening. Back in the day, there were a thousand cheapo VPS providers out there with similar rates. But DO were the ones to put up an extremely simplified interface to spinning up VMs and that has seen them skyrocket (I'm not saying this is a bad thing). At the end of the day, I feel sorry for linode. The guys who offer a much better service (in almost every way) and are often overlooke…

Why is Linode so much better? I got a bunch of free credit for DO and I'm only using it for small things so I went with them, thinking about spinning up larger projects however and would like to look at my options.

The only thing I'm aware of that, supposedly, made Linode better, is they guaranteed full compute power. If it said you got 1 CPU core, then that was yours, period. From what I understood with DO, their approach was that they'd make every effort to deliver the equivalent compute power of 1 CPU, but would not peg it to you exclusively. I also think this may have changed for DO.
Post reply on HN