Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

news.netcraft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 196 posts

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#131

Post by derefr »

[deleted] wrote: post #127
derefr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt the same way for a while, but eventually, while working on a large cloud-based project, I had an epiphany: the GUI is basically the phpMyAdmin interface of AWS. phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc. But. If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even just within your…

[deleted]

Keep in mind that I was writing this as someone who mostly uses Riak these days. ;)

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#132

Post by pjbrunet »

[deleted] wrote: post #127
derefr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt the same way for a while, but eventually, while working on a large cloud-based project, I had an epiphany: the GUI is basically the phpMyAdmin interface of AWS. phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc. But. If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even just within your…

[deleted]

Ok I got way off topic. I don't understand why Amazon.com is so intuitive but Mechanical Turk and AWS are so "bizarre".

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#133

Post by bduerst »

adestefan wrote: post #120
bduerst wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of a stretch, even for equivocation. Did you read the article in question? http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks... It took four comments, out of context, and made it into a slam. Bias of the rant aside, DO says that it was because of a TOS violation on privacy and defamation. It comes pretty close to outing where the person lives, what websites they run, and certainly makes plenty…

I don't care what it said. There is no reason for a provider to take down a blog post short of it being illegal and someone standing on their doorstep with a warrant.

Except a TOS agreement violation with a person who is obviously trolling.

Normally I would be right there with you - but in this case it was a troll who was asked to anonymize his clearly defamatory attacks, and predictably he blew up over it.

DO is a private provider, not government affiliated, so 1st amendment doesn't apply and they are protected under §230, but still they have a TOS that prevents it from becoming a safe haven for cyber bullies like this troll. TBH I'm okay with this, especially since the troll agreed to the TOS to begin with.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#134

Post by asharpe »

ap22213 wrote: post #5

Until Digital Ocean came around, I'd always thought it bizzare that there weren't more serious competitors to AWS. Under the 'competitive advantage' model, it is somewhat unusual that a diversified company like Amazon could be the most efficient vendor at providing a 'commodified', targeted offering like cloud hosting.

The costs of your own hardware are significant. A decent initial foray will be at least $1m when you think about servers, routers, switches, etc. Against VC money flowing around, that doesn't seem like much, but it is a big stretch for many start-ups to have that much cash tied up in Capital.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#135

Post by reqres »

vacri wrote: post #104
reqres wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in a nutshell you're describing Clayton Christensen process of disruptive innovation (or more specifically low end disruption). AWS is catering more and more to its most demanding users. This exposes them at the lower end to developers who aren't as demanding but prefer something simpler that better fits their needs. The way this narrative ends is that DO eats up AWS from below

I think you mean "DO gobbles up the fruit that fell from the AWS tree". Why on earth would AWS be particularly concerned that DO gets all the people who want to spend $5/server and have a handful of servers, when AWS get all the people with four-figure-plus spends? One $1000 spender is worth 20 people who rave over $5 boxes. And there are plenty of $1k spenders. AWS does have some cheap offerings - some micro instanc…

The logic you present is correct from the incumbent's perspective. But followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to the downfall of the incumbent according to Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. The incumbents will continually cater upmarket to their higher value customers while the challenger picks up more and more low value customers. But there's only so far upmarket you can go until you run out of customers and that's when the low end challenger has completely consumed the incumbent.

I think much of this thread is a testament to the lower value customers being ignored. Things about how DO is much less complex, simpler and as a result cheaper.

Here's part of a great talk from Christensen describing the same logic but in the Steel industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#136

Post by 6cxs2hd6 »

snuxoll wrote: post #118
aragot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But DigitalOcean also puts their APIs forward. It made me feel like: Wow, it's nice to use and they're geeks! So how does DO's api compares to EC2?

They're a billion times saner, they have a very simple REST API that just takes a couple GET parameters and spits out nice JSON. I built a wrapper in scala using the dispatch http library and json4s in about 15 minutes, most of that was writing a couple functions to handle the difference between the formatting conventions used by DigitalOcean's JSON and scala/java standards ("droplet_id" vs "dropletId"). Meanwhile AW…

> AWS has this nasty outdated SOAP API that you don't want to touch by hand with a 10-foot pole, you had better have a good AWS library for your existing language of choice or know how to make sense of a WSDL.

Um, no. Every AWS service has a REST API. The only difficult thing is calculating authentication headers, but that's nitpicky for a good reason.

S3's API is extremely RESTful -- not perfect, but really good. Some of Amazon's newer APIs aren't as RESTful, but they're usually still better than what many people call "REST" today (i.e. "Hey it's not SOAP, so who cares if every flipping thing is a GET request, it must be REST!").

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#137

Post by pjbrunet »

chc wrote: post #40
[deleted] wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Linode is twice as expensive per MB of RAM, but less expensive per CPU or MB of disk space.

Do you have data to back up the CPU claim? With Linode, it really depends who you're sharing a server with. I don't have as much experience with D.O. However, dollar for dollar, I think D.O. is slightly faster.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#138

Post by runako »

mberning wrote: post #14

I tried them out a few months ago looking to move my infrastructure from AWS to DO. I was experiencing terrible IO performance on a fairly expensive instance. Submitted a support ticket about it. Their response was 'this is normal'. Killed all my droplets and canceled my account the next day. To me they are running a pretty transparent pump and dump scheme. Promise a great service, sell it at a loss, get a ton of use…

I tried DO for a side project last year.

The Good: - easy setup via the Web UI - instances provision fast - They had a 960GB instance type for only $960/mo

The Bad: - Support was lackluster, kind of like "stuff happens, so your servers may or may not keep working" - DDOS mitigation was overly aggressive. A DDOS likely targeted at the prior owner of the IP caused DO to take the box offline for two days with no warning or even a note saying it had been done. It took ~30 hours for them to even figure out that they had done this. - No SAN storage, so no practical way to store data in excess of what the largest instance type will hold. This limits the utility of the largest instance type. - The killer: they have no capacity of 96GB droplets, so if our box died, we would be unable to restore from the DO snapshot. This ultimately caused us to migrate off of DO (to AWS).

So I still run a couple of nonessential projects there (total spend < $20/mo), but I wouldn't trust my paycheck to services run at DO just yet.

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#139

Post by toomuchtodo »

nl wrote: post #124
avenger123 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suspect AWS makes most of their money from clients that manage instances that are in the mid to high double digits and beyond. For these clients its likely that at some point automation has kicked in and the APIs get the job done much better versus having someone spend time clicking away in a browser.

Most of their revenue, probably. But I think there are plenty of mid-sized comapnies with multiple AWS accounts, with many machines in each one where no one is quite sure what they do or if they can be switched off.

Sounds like they need to hire someone to take care of that then.

Disclaimer: Sysadmin/Devops

Re: The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

#140

Post by dangrossman »

bduerst wrote: post #133
adestefan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care what it said. There is no reason for a provider to take down a blog post short of it being illegal and someone standing on their doorstep with a warrant.

Except a TOS agreement violation with a person who is obviously trolling. Normally I would be right there with you - but in this case it was a troll who was asked to anonymize his clearly defamatory attacks, and predictably he blew up over it. DO is a private provider, not government affiliated, so 1st amendment doesn't apply and they are protected under §230, but still they have a TOS that prevents it from becoming…

To take this to the extreme: you could shut down an innocent business that hosts on DigitalOcean by posting a threatening or defamatory comment on their blog, then making an abuse report. This puts them in the position of hosting such speech, and permits DO to cancel the service without recourse as a TOS violation. That's what you're OK with if you're OK with that being a term of the agreement. You point out that there's no first amendment issue here, but there's a lesson to be taken from the bill of rights anyway -- that sometimes protecting the rights of everyone means also protecting the rights of specific individuals you disagree with.

There may be small risk of this scenario happening, but if you are comparing to another host that doesn't make service contingent upon policing of content you host, then any risk is infinitely larger than necessary. In general, minimizing the ways my business could be wiped out by some service provider helps me sleep better at night. If a user uses a service I provide to host something defamatory, I want there to be a court order before the web host goes flipping power switches on my racks, as it's likely I'll have been contacted by someone before it gets to that point.

Post reply on HN