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

41–50 of 100 posts

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#41

Post by ghshephard »

paukiatwee wrote: post #39

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…

Alternative perspective - Recognize any time you use a cloud provider, you need to be aware that not only are the nodes ephemeral, but the zone/data center you are deploying on may go down as well.

Plan for your server to go down at any time, and, if you have actual $$$ in play, also plan for the zone to go down.

Amazon encourages this thinking by having very low-latency links between AZ (Availability Zones) - and they also recommend deploying in two geographical regions should a regional disaster occur.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#42

Post by debacle »

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 only use DO because they have a $5 offering. If Linode had a "meager support" option at $5 I would take it in a heartbeat. I love that company.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#43

Post by paukiatwee »

ghshephard wrote: post #41
paukiatwee wrote: post #39

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…

Alternative perspective - Recognize any time you use a cloud provider, you need to be aware that not only are the nodes ephemeral, but the zone/data center you are deploying on may go down as well. Plan for your server to go down at any time, and, if you have actual $$$ in play, also plan for the zone to go down. Amazon encourages this thinking by having very low-latency links between AZ (Availability Zones) - and th…

I know that all. The point is, DO support lied. After reboot, they still put my node in bad physical host. Also, DO reboot without notice (AWS have EC2 events).

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#44

Post by peterjancelis »

fredguth wrote: post #34
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.

Yes, totally agree. Any rational entrepreneur leverages his solvency into debt funding.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#45

Post by fizzbatter »

blfr wrote: post #18
jetskindo wrote: post #4

Is digital ocean profitable ? Is the 5 dollars server killing them or putting them on top of chart ?

OVH offers KVM virtual servers with SSD starting at $2.5/mo[1], and announced they will have an even smaller $1.25/mo plan[2]. All that with more memory than DO. I'm guessing that VPS providers have a low support cost/customer compared to shared hosting. No hairy compatibility issues, everything is neatly abstracted away, everyone has their own, independent environment with most of the administrative tasks offloaded…

Is there anything inherently different (security, performance, or otherwise) about these servers of Runabove's?

I run a fair amount of dev servers, and that price ($2.50) is mind blowing. But i fear that it's far too cheap to be anything but a letdown.. Thoughts?

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#47

Post by bengali3 »

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. :)

you guys rock. simple pricing, great UI, quick console access in the browser and my resizes take seconds instead of minutes.

keep up the good work.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#48

Post by blfr »

fizzbatter wrote: post #45
blfr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH offers KVM virtual servers with SSD starting at $2.5/mo[1], and announced they will have an even smaller $1.25/mo plan[2]. All that with more memory than DO. I'm guessing that VPS providers have a low support cost/customer compared to shared hosting. No hairy compatibility issues, everything is neatly abstracted away, everyone has their own, independent environment with most of the administrative tasks offloaded…

Is there anything inherently different (security, performance, or otherwise) about these servers of Runabove's? I run a fair amount of dev servers, and that price ($2.50) is mind blowing. But i fear that it's far too cheap to be anything but a letdown.. Thoughts?

They're based on OpenStack where DO rolled out their own system, I believe. On the upside, you can use all the CLI tools (nova, etc) that come with OpenStack, existing software should be compatible, and you get some of the additional cloud features (object storage, security groups). On the downside, the panel isn't as nice. The "expert mode" is just OpenStack's Horizon.

But the servers, the instances themselves, are not really any different. I benchmarked the cheapest one for ServerBear[1] a few days ago.

The one thing I miss is IPv6. DO is ahead here.

Would it be OK if I plugged my referral link[2]? With it, you get $10 to test things out.

[1] http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2014/12/09/ZyiLDuXgJGD577Eo

[2] http://runabove.me/QEME

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#49

Post by butwhy »

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.

They've been around a lot longer and have a lot of expertise. I think you'll find that they'll perform better during benchmarking of hardware and have superior network performance and uptime (I've personally experienced times where the entire DO network dropped offline for minute(s)). Their support is great too. I recommend reading up on a few comparison blogs if you wish; just make sure they were written recently and are comparing apples with apples.

But I think the general consensus amongst a lot of people is that DO are better suited to devs wanting to play around and Linode are better for when you want something more than that or want to push something to prod.

edit: now that I think of it, DO developed a reputation for terminating VMs with no notice if you violate their terms or do other things. I personally had my VMs terminated because I signed up for 2 accounts with the same IP. Imagine if I was hosting production content on there....

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#50

Post by Xeoncross »

debacle wrote: post #42
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 only use DO because they have a $5 offering. If Linode had a "meager support" option at $5 I would take it in a heartbeat. I love that company.

By the time DO started competing with Linode, it wasn't worth Linode's time to care about a cheap $5 box. The only problem is that people go to a $5 droplet and stay for a $XXX droplet.

Linode should have taken them seriously.

Post reply on HN