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DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

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Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#131

Post by bad_user »

oinksoft wrote: post #122
bad_user wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just install ufw. It's very simple to configure the rules for a basic server. Here's how: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-setup...

Why would you use that over iptables? It's simple and doesn't require installing a package. > There is a lot of functionality built into these > utilities, iptables being the most popular nowadays, but > they require a decent effort on behalf of the user to > learn and understand them. Is that a corner worth cutting?

iptables is powerful but definitely not simple.

Simple is being able to simply say "allow all outgoing traffic and incoming traffic should only be allowed for HTTP(S) and SSH" and being able to figure out how to do it by just invoking "ufw --help".

Maybe someday I'll learn about iptables, I'm sure it's going to be worth it, but for now ufw does the job for me.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#132

Post by oijaf888 »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #121
oijaf888 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run a company and are paying yourself excess profits as salaries or bonuses, you are paying payroll taxes on that money. If you have a C corp you are paying taxes on that money as dividends. If you have a pass through entity of some sort (S corp, LLC, etc) you can avoid paying payroll taxes on distributions and also avoid double taxation. Unless I'm missing something with AWS, what oversight in their system ca…

The IRS has been cracking down on people who use that loophole.... The doctor that has $50k in FICA earning and $200k in partnership distributions. Using that kind of loophole is playing with fire. You might get away with it for life, or might get stuck with a $250k tax bill at any time.

Isn't that only the case if you are paying yourself mainly via distributions? If you are paying yourself a market rate salary and taking any profits at the end of a good year via distributions would they frown on that? Assuming you have shareholders who don't work in the business (say family) I don't see how else you could distribute proceeds back to them.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#133

Post by gamblor956 »

logjammer wrote: post #99
AznHisoka wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm.. question for u. Say I start a corporation, with just me and another partner, and I need to pay myself... So the revenue earned by the company that's paid to me. that's taxed once by the company. And then again by me as salary. No? Isn't that how it works?

No, that is not how it works. Your salary is an expense for the company, paid before any corporate tax is paid, and thus reduces corporate tax. A company that has $10MM in revenue, and $10MM in salary expense will pay zero corporate income tax.

A company paying its owner $10mm in salary cannot deduct all $10 million. It could probably get away with paying a six-figure salary (fully deductible), but the rest would be re-characterized as a dividend and the underlying "salary" expense would not be deductible. At the numbers we're talking about in this hypothetical, the corporation would be treated as severely underreporting its tax liability--meaning the highest penalty rates, back interest, and possibly including jail time.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#134

Post by neom »

stephen_g wrote: post #32
Kudos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been incredibly difficult to get an answer out of them on whether they pool bandwidth[1], which would allow you to just build your own load balancers on their smallish instances while leveraging the transfer included in the rest of your clusters. I finally got an answer last night[2] 1. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... 2. https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128

Communication is my biggest issue with DO - I generally like their service but it's majorly frustrating when they just refuse to answer any questions about things like IPv6 (The best I could get out of them on that was 'Look at the UserVoice page about it' - which I already had hundreds of times over the years. Not really a great answer since the latest post by then from a staff member was something like eight months…

It's really just been a lack of people coupled with intense growth, till recently we've been well well under 50. We're working on it, and now we have money to add lots more hires.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#135

Post by verelo »

bananas wrote: post #14

Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing: * kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes. * can't resize or add storage * no freebsd support or custom kernels * VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one. * no IPv6 * somewhat shonky security reputation. * cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been…

Call me crazy, but do you think filling these issues are probably part of why they're raising funding?

Getting ahead takes capital and i'm sure they're aware of what makes them inferior, you can't raise $37m without a good story on how you're going to use it to get ahead and win.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#136

Post by api »

iamtew wrote: post #72
bananas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if the…

Moving your SSH server away from port 22 and disabling password logins is also something you should consider doing. Small thing but at least then it doesn't shout "Hey I'm a *nix box with remote login enabled"

Is it actually likely that someone would brute force a password? I always install fail2ban, but it's more just to stop bots from filling up my logs with junk and eating my bandwidth/CPU. Unless you use dumb passwords, the odds are phenomenally low.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#138

Post by fredsted »

rschmitty wrote: post #92
phaemon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do: sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 22 sudo ufw enable Then you can just edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config the same as you would on OpenBSD.

This is why I love having a static IP. sudo ufw allow from your.ip.addr to tcp port 22 Rest of the world doesnt know I have ssh up and if I'm ever in a hotel or something I can tunnel through my home or login to DO's panel and allow another ip

I could imagine this being quite dangerous, like being on holiday, there's a power outage, fire, ISP error, etc at home and no way to control your server.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#139

Post by exratione »

bananas wrote: post #14

Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing: * kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes. * can't resize or add storage * no freebsd support or custom kernels * VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one. * no IPv6 * somewhat shonky security reputation. * cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been…

Yes, they have issues with IPs having been blacklisted.

I ran into that in connection with MIPSpace. Large swathes of DO IPs are blacklisted by MIPSpace, which impacts my deliverability for a small double opt-in hobby list.

- Digital Ocean says they can't get MIPSpace to remove IPs.

- MIPSpace will only deal with me if I can get DO to add rwhois/SWIP for my IP

- Digital Ocean doesn't offer that feature (of course).

So I'm somewhat stuck there. Not as though things are going to be any better elsewhere on another cloud service, I suppose, though I never had these issues at AWS. But moving back would triple the cost of running an equivalent mail server.

Hopefully some of the funding here can be used by DO to actually clean up their IPs and manage the issues with the less reasonable blacklists like MIPSpace - who doesn't send abuse notices, and seems pretty capricious, from what I'm reading. Since DO are in the business of renting IP addresses, it would be good if those IP addresses were not usually on some blacklist somewhere.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

#140

Post by fredsted »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #114
fuzzix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either. https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ An odd experience, I would say.

That is an odd story, any idea who the author is? I find it hard to lend any sort of credence to an anonymous blog posting. Or did I miss some giant "this is who I am" link somewhere?

Yeah that sticks out. Author should have the courage to not be anonymous, especially for something silly like this. For all we know it could be a disgruntled Linode employee faking this or something. :)

But if true, I'm moving everything away to a more professional hosting provider. You don't just shut down a hosting account because of a single anonymous complaint. That's just a silly thing to waste your time with.

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