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DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

businesswire.com

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Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#51

Post by debacle »

Xeoncross wrote: post #50
debacle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, if I ever need a real machine I would switch back to Linode. It's not very difficult and the support is astronomically better.

But it would definitely be to Linode's benefit to gank DO's $5 option.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#52

Post by dwild »

adventured wrote: post #40
Igglyboo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where have you seen that you have a dedicated CPU core on Linode?

In the VPS market it's nothing unusual to oversell CPU, you can't only have 24 VM on a single server, that doesn't work financially (except if they count threads from hyper-threading as a core but that's not dedicated).

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#53

Post by gedrap »

I really like the content marketing approach DO took.

If you google for some standard server maintenance problem (e.g. migrating from Apache to nginx), it's usually DO which is ranked first. Their posts are relatively high quality, and there are a lot of them, enough to cover many common problems. For example: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migr...

It doesn't show annoying pop ups, anything like that, but after visiting those pages many times you might decide to give DO a go. Well, that's what I did.

Also, some people say that similar cheap VPS providers exist for a long time and what DO did was put a nice simple UI. That proves that to create a successful product, you don't need some new complicated features that your competitors do not offer. Making interactions with the system easier, improving user onboarding process by reducing friction can go a long way.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#54

Post by mbesto »

INTPenis wrote: post #3
peterjancelis wrote: post #2

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

So what is that to us who don't speak English natively, a loan?

Actually, in simple terms it's like having a big credit card with $50m in a line of credit. Saying this is funding is like saying I just received $5,000 every time I open a credit card.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#55

Post by GrinningFool »

blfr wrote: post #48
fizzbatter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was going to sign up, but halfway through realized I can't do it without actually providing a payment method (in spite of the credit). I hope you got the $10 credit for my initial sign-up though.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#57

Post by Donzo »

adventured wrote: post #40
Igglyboo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been following my DO allocation using New Relic. When I first signed up, I noticed the hypervisor stealing from my allocation. Not a lot, but some. After a week or two, however, this ceased. I can now report that for almost a year now I have been receiving my full allocation. I am very pleased with DO, but based on the good things that I've read on here, I'll give Linode a shot if DO ever drops the ball horrendously.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#58

Post by drzaiusapelord »

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…

Linode seems to be going strong. I wouldn't dare put anything in production on a rickety shop like DO. Especially after the whole controversy of them taking down someone's blog because it criticized some VP's friend at Google. DO feels like a company founded by devs first and sysadmins last.

DO seems to be for devs farting around and kids putting up wordpress sites. Its not really competing with shops like Linode or Rackspace. That may change, but everything about DO screams, "Do not use me for production."

Meanwhile, my 7 or so production VMs on Linode are going strong and now have been migrated to their new SSD-based platform.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#59

Post by icelancer »

gabemart wrote: post #36
tim333 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. I don't need $10 droplets for all of my internal servers, so the cost adds up significantly. I run a cluster of $5 droplets as well as a few large units, and I'm sure many people have similar use cases.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#60

Post by icelancer »

Donzo wrote: post #57
adventured wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been following my DO allocation using New Relic. When I first signed up, I noticed the hypervisor stealing from my allocation. Not a lot, but some. After a week or two, however, this ceased. I can now report that for almost a year now I have been receiving my full allocation. I am very pleased with DO, but based on the good things that I've read on here, I'll give Linode a shot if DO ever drops the ball horrendo…

What's the best way to check allocation theft using NR?
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