DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#121

Post by threeseed » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #102

dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

I disagree, Linode is much superior than DO. I can trust to DO only fault-tolerant services when to Linode I can trust any kind of service to run.

Could not disagree more. I would NEVER run anything serious on Linode.

They have a long history of withholding information from customers in the face of security incidents and outages. The last time they were hacked I found out from Reddit that it happened and even when they bothered to tell me they failed to say (a) what actually happened or (b) what steps they took to prevent it occurring again. And many, many outages had information communicated on the IRC hours before website was updated.

It is the culture and professionalism that differentiates one VPS provider from another. Linode gets a massive thumbs down for me.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#122

Post by Beached » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #22

nosequel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't even in the same ballpark. Hell, Google isn't even in the same ballpark as AWS and Google made $83million in the time it took me to read the article. DO is great, but doesn't belong in the same sentence as AWS.

Azure is closest I think. Enterprisey cloud hosting.

my goodness, I was reading through this entire thread and all I was thinking about is "How come no one is mentioning Azure".

I have tried Azure, AWS, and DO, and by far the most stable and usable one is Azure. I thought I was the only one who thought Azure was good...

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#123

Post by neom » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

jordanlev wrote: post #85

dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

Funny... I remember when Linode first became really popular, it was right around the time Slicehost got bought (and subsequently shut down by) Rackspace. A lot of people moved over to Linode because Slicehost was no more (or when the writing was on the wall that it would soon become no more). So perhaps you're correct that lack of funding is making Linode lazy now, but that doesn't mean that getting bought or accepti…

https://angel.co/digitalocean

Jason sits on the board of DigitalOcean. :)

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#124

Post by threeseed » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #119

exacube wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

A reasonable question For me :- * Excellent reliability (no unscheduled downtime in 6 years from 3 to at one point more than a dozen nodes) * Excellent hardware - when I've benchmarked real production systems on Linode on a $/perf ratio beats DO hands down * Excellent support - tickets are generally answered in under 30 minutes and staff are knowledgeable * It just works(TM) * Straightforward interface and pricing *…

For me:

a) Average reliability - had numerous incidents at their London and Fremont DCs. And the complete inability to tell me what was happening in a timely manner was pretty unacceptable.

b) Average support - they will answer the simple questions very quickly. But anything reasonably complex they will actually not bother responding at all.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#125

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

Beached wrote: post #122

brianwawok wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure is closest I think. Enterprisey cloud hosting.

my goodness, I was reading through this entire thread and all I was thinking about is "How come no one is mentioning Azure". I have tried Azure, AWS, and DO, and by far the most stable and usable one is Azure. I thought I was the only one who thought Azure was good...

Most people here (including me) are not windows people, so Azure is obviously not going to be the first place we look to.

They have linux VMs which is cool, but still not sure I would pick them.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#126

Post by threeseed » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #63

astrodust wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the money Linode has on hand, and the size of their technical team, it's absolutely insulting they haven't made any tangible improvement to their management front-end in at least five years, if not more. The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.

For what is worth, I've been a Linode customer for a few years and never really felt their management front-end was in urgent need of an update. It's solid and does the job for us. My only complains to be honest are 1) the lack of storage dedicated nodes, as OP points out, and 2) the price, it gets very expensive very fast as you scale and spin more nodes. We are currently considering moving to dedicated machines but…

> never really felt their management front-end was in urgent need of an update

Even when it was hacked multiple times and customer VPSs compromised e.g.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...

Nothing is worse than spending weeks securing every aspect of your VPS only to have incidents like this appear. And worst of all ? To this day Linode never clearly said what happened or what they did to prevent it happening again.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#127

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:24 PM UTC

waffle_ss wrote: post #64

brianwawok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

> I guess client DNS retries takes a few seconds Have you tested this in all the browsers? According to this ServerFault post[1], it could take minutes for an IP address to be considered "down" in Chromium before it cycles to the next one; Firefox apparently waits 20 seconds[2]. Those posts are dated 2011 but I can't imagine the behavior would've changed a whole lot since then. A user is not going to wait multiple mi…

I have tested it in production, and seen traffic move! I am honestly not sure I ever had a customer access my site in Chromium, so that is not a deal breaker either way (assuming it wasn't also a Chrome bug).

Hacker news takes > 20 seconds to load all the time. You mash reload and go on with your life.

I think people get too hung up on "I must have the most optimal HA setup in the history of the world" they end up having no HA, or spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to make some elaborate AWS rube goldberg device that lets you checkoff a bunch of HA boxes. I know a lot of people who did that, and their fancy AWS HA contraption totally fails in the real world because the entire US-EAST region went down and operation depending on at least one availability zone of it working to stay up. Look how much effort Netflix puts into HA, and how many hours a year they are totally broken.

For each application, you have many competing desires. You can have a HA website or web application without using IP failover. IP failover is cool, but not without it's own problems. Every solution has pros and cons. DNS round robin is not a bad solution for many classes of apps that want dead simple failover.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#128

Post by cgag » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #9

buckbova wrote: post #3

I've got two droplets now, one for email/owncloud and another for personal projects with automated backups. It's pretty easy to use, but I worry I don't have the sysadmin chops to keep it secure. Edit: I followed tutorials on auto-updating packages through cron, securing ssh, and setting up ufw for only services needed when I set it up. It's been about 2 years now so maybe I shouldn't worry.

Would anybody be interested in esoteric hosting? Think Linode, but specifically for FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Plan9/TempleOS/MinuetOS/etc.?

I want one where I can run Dragonfly. I'm using vultr at the moment but I had to do some manual stuff, I just want to choose Dragonfly like you choose ubuntu at digial ocean.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#129

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

vruiz wrote: post #97

brianwawok wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year? How about services you use a lot. How many hours has hacker News been down in 2015 (yet you are still on it right now)? How many hours has netflix been down in 2015? How many hours has entire chunks of AWS been down in 2015? Every business is a spectrum. A HFT trading shop may decide that 1 second downtime per day is their max outage. A webpage adv…

> Name a business that has not had a 30 second outage in the past year? It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP. Anyway, I won't try to convince you to change your setup if you are happy with it, but it's obvious…

> It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP.

So with 5 load balancers, 1/5 of customers see a one time hit of 30 seconds (after which they return to full speed).

What better solution for the same price do you propose to get HA on a budget cloud provider?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#130

Post by riquito » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #121

EugeneOZ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Linode is much superior than DO. I can trust to DO only fault-tolerant services when to Linode I can trust any kind of service to run.

Could not disagree more. I would NEVER run anything serious on Linode. They have a long history of withholding information from customers in the face of security incidents and outages. The last time they were hacked I found out from Reddit that it happened and even when they bothered to tell me they failed to say (a) what actually happened or (b) what steps they took to prevent it occurring again. And many, many outa…

Their blog answer most of your questions.

https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/

You can't prevent 0 days, and the informations hacked were encrypted.