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DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

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Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#131

Post by chrismarlow9 »

stephen-mw wrote: post #107
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #78

I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running. I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way the…

Why not just use AWS? Seems like you went from bad to slightly better. There's no reason to fear virtualization, and the automation is definitely one of the best aspects of running in a major cloud.

Because I prefer a set of simple and basic tools used in combination to accomplish something instead of a "push this button and it does everything" approach. It's the *nix pipe mentality of combining simple well built tools to build solid and reliable things that you can adapt any way you please.

I also build things that are heavy on the network side, and virtualization drops networking performance a great deal (this may be changed these days, not sure).

Don't get me wrong. I don't fear virtualization. I use virtualbox and vmware heavily for development, and yes they do have a purpose, but it's a bad fit for the type of projects I build.

I just find that anything in life that just continues to add features for the sake of adding features, and create more and more "magic" push buttons to solve your problems eventually goes to crap and becomes a fragmented dependency hell that I would rather not deal with. And yes, I do love Golang.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#132

Post by hudj1jcnapru38 »

austenallred wrote: post #68
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…

When people ask, "Why does HN/the tech industry pay so much attention to the companies that are raising money?" I'll point them to this. There's absolutely nothing wrong with bootstrapping and making a good living, but the stuff that goes big and wants to scale quickly usually has to raise a bunch of money to get there.

OTOH, taking money puts pressure on a bigger exit/revenue scaling plan. To me, that means more like GoDaddy and less like prgmr, which is not what I want from my service providers.

The pressure to expand is a negative indicator when I'm a user of a service.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#133

Post by EugeneOZ »

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...

MS has strong reputation of company with closed-source and vendor-locked stack, so many of us can't feel "first-class citizens" in the MS world. But they are working on their reputation, VS Code is a very good example, and I hope soon we will not afraid to trust them.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#135

Post by mumphster »

threeseed wrote: post #126
Mahn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure why this is being downvoted but the whole Linode hack incident was a huge factor for me to switch all my VPS's over to digital ocean.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#136

Post by astrodust »

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…

It "does the job" but it's not as pleasant to use as it could be. A lot of the navigation is pointless and confusing, information is often buried several levels deep, and there's missing information on some of the detail screens you need to go back to the main listing to find: Instance type is only shown on the main list, not the individual instance tab, for example.

If GitHub had never improved their site since they launched it would be awful. Every time they move things forward I'm happier to be a paying customer. With Linode I reluctantly use them, but for new projects I'm using other services that work better.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#137

Post by astrodust »

seunosewa wrote: post #59
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.

Perhaps users don't have any complaints about their management interface? Do you? Perhaps users mostly want performance and value which have been greatly improved by their substantial infrastructure upgrades?

Perhaps those complaints just get ignored.

I know Digital Ocean's control panel has improved several times since their launch, and their ability to launch instances with a complete stack is extremely useful. Linode has done nothing here. They point to their badly documented StackScripts system and shrug.

There's a hundred things Linode could do to make user's lives easier and they've done maybe two or three of them.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#138

Post by astrodust »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #98
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.

Linode is good and simple if you have a not too large amount of nodes or complex need for extra bits, and I appreciate them for that. I didn't really need anything shinier. Is it super-cloudy? Not so much, but also nice that you don't have to think about it.

Why do people think "well designed" translates to superficial and pointless? Yes, sometimes this is the case, but when you have pride in your work you'll want to present it in the best possible light.

Would you rather eat in a restaurant where all the chairs are creaky, where the tables are wobbly, and where the wait staff is doing their best to get by with broken equipment, or would you instead visit down the street to a place where everything may not be new but it's well maintained? If the food quality was the same, why would you insist on going to the place with crappy, broken stuff?

Linode just doesn't seem to care about their site at all. If they did they'd listen to user feedback and improve things once in a while. You know, like at least once every six years.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#139

Post by astrodust »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #104
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.

If we talk about DO in comparison, then DO's interface is just ugly and almost unusable. Every time I use it, I want to leave their site as soon as possible.

If you think Digital Ocean is ugly and almost unusable I have to wonder what you think is better.

Their one page instance creator where you pick size, location, and distribution is extremely convenient. This is three separate steps with Linode that happens over the course of six screens, plus two more if you want to enable private networking.

Eight steps vs. one.

They also don't offer the ability to install a system with an SSH key pre-installed avoiding the need for password authentication when bootstrapping your system. Even on a technical level Linode is way behind here.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#140

Post by joeyspn »

I've been with many VPS providers: KnownHost, RackSpace Cloud, OVH, Linode, etccc and DO has been a pleasure to work with because of all the integrations and tooling it has due to the increasing popularity/community.

I think this is a great step for a transition from a "developers cloud" to a "production cloud". I hope they continue to go in the same direction and soon offer multi-container blueprints as easy to deploy as their pre-built images.

0.02

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