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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#141

Post by alexellisuk »

mrtksn wrote: post #92
Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

They also have a referral program that turned DigitalOcean to free hosting for me. A few years ago I got annoyed with something, wrote an article about how to fix it using a DO instance, linked to DO with my referral code and racked up thousands of $ in a payout. I used most when experimenting and feeling too lazy to shut down instances(because I didn't want to go through backup since maybe I will use it later etc).…

I have a lot of content on DO, and a few hundred referrals but most are pending, devs aren't even spending enough to trigger a payout.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#142

Post by zippy »

biztos wrote: post #96
Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

you, personally, may be a high margin customer, but some, and perhaps a lot, of the $5/no customers are potential liabilities due to not patching software or libraries or choosing terrible passwords for their services, databases, etc.

one decent incident can cost a multiple of a year's revenue for the account.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#143

Post by derefr »

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

> That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave broken programs running that chew through this precious resource for no reason. If you throttle them, they'll complain.

This makes it sound like you could get a big win in the VPS-provider space by drawing an ROI line at ~$20, and making all instances below that size diskless, with their rootfs being either a tmpfs overlay of a shared SAN-mount of a base image (like a LiveCD environment), or a tmpfs into which was dumped a PXE initramfs image (as e.g. CoreOS does in its idiomatic deploy style.)

I feel like many customer use-cases would still be satisfied by such instances (especially if you also offer local object-storage for the diskless instances to interact with.) It'd sort of be a hybrid position between ephemeral PaaS containers, and actual persistent VMs.

Anyone know of a provider that provides low-cost long-running diskless VPSes like this?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#144

Post by djsumdog »

daxorid wrote: post #136
timfrietas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :) When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.

Yes, but one thing Vultr didn't copy from DO is their disgusting and virulent anti-free speech position. The result is a superior product. Today, Vultr offers similar service, at a lower price point, without the risk that your entire account will be suspended for thinking unapproved thoughts. This is a pretty good selling point to anyone who isn't an apparatchik of modern political and social dogma.

I forgot DigitalOcean was one of the players when all this shit went down:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#145

Post by alexellisuk »

Townley wrote: post #55

I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly. Cloud resources should be a commodity. Providers should offer compute resources, persistent storage, load balancers, and MAYBE a small handful of other services. The way Digital Ocean succeeds against AWS is by aligning itself with this idea, and competing on specialization. Forget competi…

> I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly.

So much this

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#146

Post by roguecoder »

shakezula wrote: post #72

Is it just me or are we starting to see the first signs of mass lay-offs in tech? Mozilla, now DigitalOcean, I feel like we're starting to see the first bleeding cuts of the recession take hold. And I just got my life together, too.

It is January: layoffs often cluster during January. I'm not yet seeing a flood of candidates for our open roles, so I'm not worried.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#147

Post by jimmaswell »

zippy wrote: post #142
biztos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

you, personally, may be a high margin customer, but some, and perhaps a lot, of the $5/no customers are potential liabilities due to not patching software or libraries or choosing terrible passwords for their services, databases, etc. one decent incident can cost a multiple of a year's revenue for the account.

is this just about cpu power from exploits?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#149

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

biztos wrote: post #96
Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

Shit, you've just reminded me that I have to finish some ansible playbooks I started in september. The VPS they were supposed to configure only had some hardening an no traffic since then.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#150

Post by bob1029 »

wakatime wrote: post #108

WakaTime switched to DigitalOcean and we're loving their performance to cost ratio. Their compute droplet machines are much better than AWS ec2[1], especially if you need low-latency SSD IOPs. The only AWS services we still use are S3 and Route53, because S3's performance is better than Spaces[2]. Really hope this doesn't spell bad weather ahead. [1] DigitalOcean Droplets > AWS Ec2 (based on our production metrics) […

I tell you what... If it weren't for Route53 being as good as it is and getting all of our domains sucked into it's gaping maw, we would be much more likely to hop to different cloud vendors. It is very nice having the entire enterprise tech stack managed through a single vendor when you are a tiny company like we are.

That said, I am losing patience with how slow the EC2 instances are considering what we pay. I've got management asking increasingly-probing questions about our monotonically-incrementing AWS bill. All of this would be fine if perceived/actual performance weren't also dropping for us over time (I.e. intel spectre mitigations). I can almost feel how the AMZN profit margins are squeezing us at this point... It's almost a weekly conversation now with Azure or even a return to on-prem being brought up. "Do we move now or later? Is the frying pan hot enough yet?"

Our organization is small enough to comfortably fit onto a single 2S 128 core AMD Rome system. Why shouldn't we just lease out a half-rack somewhere local (I.e. near the developers who can care for it) and then stick a few of their systems, a switch, router and management hardware in there? This all began on-prem with us moving to AWS, and after 6 years in the cloud circus it's starting to feel like a safe place to return to. Perhaps we will just move our compute to on-prem and continue to use AWS for backups and DNS. All I know is my TR 2950X workstation can compile our solution ~10x faster than our Jenkins server which is running on a T2.Large. Imagine giving Jenkins 32 Rome cores. This is something we could actually afford if we owned the hardware.

There are also some other compelling factors for us to consider moving back on-prem. Emerging technologies like Blazor create a strong argument for keeping your workers near the datacenter. Very few businesses truly require more than 1 physical datacenter. Yes, you might also have a DR site, but you can arguably run all of the functions for 95%+ of businesses out of a single physical location. Also, having a physical location where you can hook up any arbitrary hardware means we could also pull our iOS build machine in-house and use proper high-end Apple hardware on the same local network as the rest of our infrastructure.

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