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DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

businesswire.com

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Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#91

Post by InclinedPlane »

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, exactly. But getting a loan or a line of credit in the multi-million dollar range implies a certain level of trust in the viability of your company which typically is lacking in most early stage startups. The risk associated with venture capital transforms that relationship into not merely a financial transaction but more of a partnership, which is why equity is typically given.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#92

Post by brianwawok »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #58
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…

How many startups have devs and no sysadmins? Seems like if a 2 man shop can make DO work without a sysadmin, they just saved a lot of money. When you get big then you can worry about such things.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#93

Post by joshmn »

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…

I love RunAbove. I really do.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#94

Post by PascalW »

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…

Been playing around with runabove as well lately and am liking it so far. Ideal for personal projects that need a bit of resources.

Hopefully the 1GB plan will be available soon. That tweet is from October but it doesn't appear to be available yet.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#95

Post by digitalzombie »

gedrap wrote: post #53

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 l…

Linode and IIRC Slicehosting had these.

I'm just glad they actually took that idea from them and anybody that provide any services should have these tutorials... It makes it much more approachable for people with little system admin skills.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#96

Post by raiyu »

jread wrote: post #82
gabemart wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you're sharing the 1Gb/s link with who knows how many $5 droplets - resulting in unpredictable IO. Linode network IO is dedicated and scalable to 10 Gb/s. DO is shared and capped at 1 Gb/s - even on the largest droplet.

Thanks for bringing this up, this is part of why we closed such a large debt round so that we could really focus on the next evolution of the hardware that we use. There are a lot of things in the works for that and we will be really excited to share them.

Thanks

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#97

Post by raiyu »

corford wrote: post #75
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 bet the wrong way by prioritising more cores over SSDs and I think this slip up is what gave DO room to enter the market. Had Linode moved to SSDs earlier and offered their cheapest VM @ $10 instead of $20, DO's trajectory may have been a little different. Also, Linode was (and still is) very bad at marketing imho. DO definitely spanked them on that front (both through their content marketing strategy and just…

Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely looking to improve a lot of the missing features and capabilities and really looking forward to 2015 in that regard.

As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome.

Thanks

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#98

Post by pangram »

raiyu wrote: post #97
corford wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode bet the wrong way by prioritising more cores over SSDs and I think this slip up is what gave DO room to enter the market. Had Linode moved to SSDs earlier and offered their cheapest VM @ $10 instead of $20, DO's trajectory may have been a little different. Also, Linode was (and still is) very bad at marketing imho. DO definitely spanked them on that front (both through their content marketing strategy and just…

Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely looking to improve a lot of the missing features and capabilities and really looking forward to 2015 in that regard. As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome. Thanks

We switched from DO to Linode a few months ago. I think DO is great, but three things convinced us to move over to Linode. 1) lack of robust logging, 2) we'd get intermittent connectivity problems about once a month (this was in the SF colo), and 3) backups were unreliable, and support didn't really have a good answer as for why the backups were so unreliable. You can send me an HN message if you want more details.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#99

Post by manueslapera »

gedrap wrote: post #53

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 l…

THIS.

DO has a dedicate team just providing incredible tutorials that are somewhat related but not completely related to DO itself.

Re: DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

#100

Post by corford »

raiyu wrote: post #97
corford wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode bet the wrong way by prioritising more cores over SSDs and I think this slip up is what gave DO room to enter the market. Had Linode moved to SSDs earlier and offered their cheapest VM @ $10 instead of $20, DO's trajectory may have been a little different. Also, Linode was (and still is) very bad at marketing imho. DO definitely spanked them on that front (both through their content marketing strategy and just…

Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely looking to improve a lot of the missing features and capabilities and really looking forward to 2015 in that regard. As for the professionalism and reliability I'd love to hear more as those are items we need to be addressing immediately and the feedback would be very welcome. Thanks

Hey raiyu

Only just seen your reply now. I have no doubt you guys are going to keep on getting better and better and if I were Linode I'd be very worried. I should have mentioned too that it's natural for their to be a capability gap at the moment - Linode's been going since 2003 IIRC so they have had a rather large head start.

In terms of reliability and professionalism, my complaints are very similar to pangram's. Another issue that bit me last week was OpenVPN failing after an apt-get update due to DO forcing a particular kernel outside of the VM.

All of these things are teething issues though and I'm sure you'll get them licked sooner or later (hence why I'm keeping the 3 VMs I have with you).

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