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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#161

Post by blackflame »

sekh60 wrote: post #159
blackflame wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of using expensive SSDs. A topology of many spanning disks in large ZFS clusters by using PCIe HDD controllers. Then link the machines via 10GBe could provide you the speed and performance you require require. I've set up a moderate size pool of 1Pb across 16 physical servers on 4 full size racks. This cost less than 50k. Electricity and cooling come from solar. Its the damn internet connection for peop…

I believe DO uses Ceph for storage, much more scalable than a do-it-yourself zfs solution and a lot easier to manage.

Oh yea it's always easier with scale. The main point I was trying to make is that the hardware is actually pretty cheap compared to the network costs to link it. Especially when large companies dump 2 year old servers for pennies on the dollar because the electricity costs at their scale justify it.

Side note: I took that cluster and split it into 8. Then moved them to different geographical locations and where I could use friend or families residential connections and a cloudflare cluster to offset my cost in exchange for unlimited hosting. Very similar to Ceph actually

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#162

Post by milankragujevic »

jvagner wrote: post #157
milankragujevic wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 $5/mo plan. Well, to be honest, Vultr has 2.5$ (IPv6 only) and 3.5$ plans. So, if they're getting by, so could DO. https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing I actually migrated from DO to Vultr because at the time…

I think you're making the OPs point for them. And we have no idea if a similar action by Vultr is imminent (I'm not saying it is -- but we don't know ).

> They'll yell and threaten when you tell them that this is outside the scope of what you can do.

They will, and you will tell them to leave. Unmanaged VPS' are unmanaged.

> Those pwned customers are complaining and demanding that you fix it Tell them to leave, they are paying $5/mo after all.

> regular customers are also upset because of slowness due to the "noisy neighbor" problem inherent to all VPSes Throttle abusive users, and hand-wave it via AUP, TOS, etc.

> neither gives you great tools for dealing with disk bandwidth That could, should and will be fixed sometime.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#163

Post by icedchai »

derefr wrote: post #143
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 drawi…

You'd get too many support requests from customers wondering why all their data disappeared after they rebooted.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#164

Post by jiofih »

While better pricing is always nice, I really wish they would refocus on the user experience in their platform. When adding up droplets + storage + LB + database, the price difference is there, but mostly you don’t feel it’s worth it - you still have to do configure everything yourself. If they offered something more akin to Heroku or Now I’d be jumping all over it.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#166

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

ForHackernews wrote: post #154
lozaning wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the interesting metrics from my time working in global escalations for one of the worlds largest electronics manufacturers is that most customers don't call in for support, but on average we get 3.5 calls per user per account lifetime. The 80/20 rule in in full effect here. The 'needy' customers are extremely resource intensive.

Unless you're a business that differentiates itself with good customer support, you can just fire expensive customers.

You could, but there would be a significant risk of serious reputational harm.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#167

Post by closeparen »

chadlavi wrote: post #41
wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

DigitalOcean has always been great place to host single-server Rails/Django/PHP app.

But support for more complex backend infrastructures targeted by the cloud providers, with network segmentation and load balancers and autoscaling clusters, has only started to grow in recently. There is nothing approaching any cloud provider's IAM.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#168

Post by krn »

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…

> 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.

The founders of NordVPN have recently invested in Hostinger[1], which has successfully adopted their extremely profitable pricing model: charging for 2-4 years in advance, by default. This way, even those who would have paid $5 / month and cancelled and a few months later, end up spending $100+ for 24-48 months at once, often without having a clear need for it, thus leaving a lot of resources underutilized – and available for overselling. The company has more than doubled in size in the last 3 years, more than a decade after its inception.

[1] https://www.hostinger.com/

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#169

Post by challenged »

blackflame wrote: post #126
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…

Maybe instead of using expensive SSDs. A topology of many spanning disks in large ZFS clusters by using PCIe HDD controllers. Then link the machines via 10GBe could provide you the speed and performance you require require. I've set up a moderate size pool of 1Pb across 16 physical servers on 4 full size racks. This cost less than 50k. Electricity and cooling come from solar. Its the damn internet connection for peop…

> Its the damn internet connection for people to access it that is the cost killer.

Nope. Any hosting provider will be located at a carrier neutral datacenter or the like. At any of these you will have access to low cost IP transit providers and Internet exchanges. You can buy 100G IP transit for $5k per month, so Internet cost isn't really an issue.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#170

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

icedchai wrote: post #163
derefr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 drawi…

You'd get too many support requests from customers wondering why all their data disappeared after they rebooted.

I wonder if you could map the writes to the drive to some sort of permanent storage programatically.
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