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DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

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131–140 of 289 posts

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#132

What happens when one of these mini-cloud providers like DO, Linode, and Vultr folds? What are the consequences as a customer? Does all your data just evaporate into the aether?

Yes, which is why no matter who your provider is, you should have an off-site backup.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#133
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alibaba and Baidu have a totally other market segment, which is domestic Chinese companies that want and need to be fully compatible with Chinese law for domestic data hosting, retention, government compliance. There is a venn diagram overlap between the markets addressed by the (AWS, Azure, DO, etc) and the Chinese virtual machine providers, but it's nowhere near 100%.

No, they have tons of business outside of China, just take 5 minutes to google that. People can of course challenge their bookkeeping, but still...

>No, they have tons of business outside of China

If not for China they wouldn't be where they are and wouldn't have succeeded. Having a large core market you are the most competitive in (due to government regulations) provides a massive upside that you can then leverage in other markets.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#134

I used them for my private VPSes but they became too big and business-like. I moved to Scaleway now, it's still in a much earlier stage, cheaper and with unlimited bandwidth. I like the way you can still talk directly to their guys on slack to ask questions. However they're becoming big too. I hope they'll still love us and I don't have to move again soon :)

What's your experience with the service? I'm with Linode at the moment, primarily because DO doesn't have an Aussie region. Seems like Scaleway is much better value for money; however reviews on Reddit don't seem favourable.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#135
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the debt really acts like a line of credit, in that we are using it for hardware which is then immediately put into service and generating revenue, so the available debt and the drawn down debt are different terms and really there is no need to draw additional down additional debt if the company stopped growing tomorrow. That aside on the equity side we only raised $123MM. Assuming that the acquiring entity sees…

I hope this comment ages well also! People deserve compensation for the value they've created. I appreciate that you took the time to reply; you might have Crunchbase update their info, as my comments are based off them showing >$300MM in equity funding. Your numbers make the scenario look much better.

Yeah - they just lump everything together. They even include employees selling secondary as "raised" capital and the same for debt which is inaccurate.

I'd be happy to tell them that, but I'm a little annoyed with them because they used to list everything publicly and then put a bunch of stuff behind a paywall. Doubt, that it would matter much to them regardless plus we are one of the few startups that raises both equity and debt, so I don't think it something that happens often enough for them to really change how things operate on their end.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#136
post #92

I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise. If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options. If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. How does DO get out of thi…

You hit the nail on the head, we are best for SMBs and teams that want to get things done quickly and don't need the hyperscale and added complexity of AWS. Our focus has always been on simplicity and as our customer needs and our own internal needs have grown we've added additional products to continue to allow customers to scale with us. We launched with just Droplets in 2012 and have since added block storage, Spa…

yeah I'm not sure about your last paragraph. when I interviewed at DO, the few business folks I spoke to were adamant on taking on AWS. I kind of scoffed but hey I'm not running DO.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#137
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.

Pretty sure Linode is comparable price wise and in Europe there are cheaper options like OVH. Digital Ocean pricing becomes pretty comparable with GCP and others when you start specing up to a "production-grade" server i.e. the kind of server you actually want to run Postgres on. Their K8s offering I think is the cheapest of all major providers but you lose out of secondary benefits like GKE's fantastic log analysis…

Just popping in to say that OVH is the cheapest option for a reason -- support/monitoring/any other features you might want are just not there like they might be on other providers.

I host a single tiny website on OVH and they restart it randomly every ~4 months without warning (seriously). It was annoying at first until I set our services to run on system boot.

Some more discussion at discourse.org that's relevant: https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-o...

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#138

I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise. If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options. If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. How does DO get out of thi…

I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.

You can get OpenVZ or even KVM boxes for half the price or better. I have one running as a simple nginx webserver and OpenVPN server that I pay under $30 a year for

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#139

What happens when one of these mini-cloud providers like DO, Linode, and Vultr folds? What are the consequences as a customer? Does all your data just evaporate into the aether?

I assume you download your data.

Re: DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M

#140

I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise. If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options. If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. How does DO get out of thi…

I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.

AWS Lightsail has a $3.50/month option that might work for you if you want a VM. You could even consider something like nearlyfreespeech.net if you dont need full control of the tech stack.
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