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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#211

Post by znpy »

nurettin wrote: post #171
znpy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have interviewed with DO and they tried diverting me towards a support position. They told me that on a single day a support engineer was supposed to help/advice customers on pretty much whatever the customer was having issue with and also handle something between 80-120 tickets per day. It's nice to see that DO is willing to help on pretty much anything they (read: their team) has knowledge about, but with 80-120…

7 tireless hours of work (with lunch break) 15 minutes to Listen, understand and resolve an issue, assuming perfect knowledge, a lot of luck and normal human speed, that would still amount to less than 30 resolutions a day.

something's not clear: are you talking from direct experience ?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#212

Post by sigstoat »

jeremyjh wrote: post #199
sigstoat wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any case, it's also probably too much infrastructure cost for a 2-man company. keeping your production and your backups in the same cloud provider is the equivalent of keeping your backup tapes right next to the computer they're backing up. you're exposing them both to strongly correlated risks. you've just changed those risks from "fire, water, theft" to "provider, incompetence, security breach"

So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3? I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

> So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3?

...

> > "fire, water, theft"

i'm sure you could add a few more things to the list.

> I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

not terribly common to understand risk.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#213

Post by spamizbad »

Kovah wrote: post #95
spamizbad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, but it sounds like it’s a 1-man technical operation.

Being just one person is no excuse. I am a 1-man technical operation too, and I know that backups have to be stored on two different locations.

You're correct. But there are also unicorns that don't follow this rule. It's just that their compute activity would never trigger a false-positive, so everyone (except their ops team) is blissfully unaware of their fragility.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#214

Post by luhn »

It's easy to think your data is safe when your cloud provider advertises 11 9's of durability. But three replicas of your data doesn't protect against things like this. Even in the cloud age, offsite backups are important: Different provider, different region, different payment method.

Unfortunately it doesn't help that cloud egress bandwidth is criminally expensive.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#215

Post by AcerbicZero »

Someone1234 wrote: post #145
jlv2 wrote: post #40

Best Twitter comment (grammar errors and all): "And if your full business relies on one tech partner (no offsite backups) your not doing your tech job right."

This is conflating two different things. One point is valid, the other is not. - No offsite backups? Agreed. Even for a two person team it is sloppy. - "Relies on one tech partner?" Strongly disagree. Even large enterprises often have a hard dependency on AWS, Azure, Rackspace, or similar. To suggest that a two person team should have deployment plans for multiple independent cloud vendors is just fantastical thinkin…

Some may have an availability dependency on those services, but if they don't have a full BC and DR plan ready to go within a few hours of losing those service they're not going to be a big enterprise for long.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#216

Post by Retra »

znpy wrote: post #211
nurettin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 tireless hours of work (with lunch break) 15 minutes to Listen, understand and resolve an issue, assuming perfect knowledge, a lot of luck and normal human speed, that would still amount to less than 30 resolutions a day.

something's not clear: are you talking from direct experience ?

30 tasks x 0.25 hours per task is 7.5 hours. Looks simply like a calculation.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#217

Post by jeremyjh »

sigstoat wrote: post #212
jeremyjh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3? I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

> So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3? ... > > "fire, water, theft" i'm sure you could add a few more things to the list. > I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy. not terribly common to understand risk.

Storing a file on two tier1s would surely protect you from fire, water, theft no? Yet you will also be paying for all the extra copies Amazon and Google each make. I'm not disagreeing that this is the right strategy, just pointing out that the market offerings and trends don't support it.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#218

Post by icebraining »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #156
_bxg1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's normally a consideration or not, there are no meaningful barriers in terms of cost or effort, so it's totally realistic to expect it of a tiny startup. Every week there's another article on HN about a tiny business being squished in the gears of a giant, automated platform. In some cases like app stores this is unavoidable, but there are plenty of hosting providers to choose from. People need to learn th…

And there are a million stories of startups who build the wrong thing, don't achieve product-market fit, etc. You can't dot every I, cross every t and also build a compelling product as a 2 person shop.

Then maybe you shouldn't be building that product with a 2 person shop.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#219

Post by AYBABTME »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #114

Some people on HN hate Linode because of their past security screwups (which is valid), but having used both DO and Linode quite a lot, the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. DO's tier 1 support is almost useless. I set up a new account with them recently for a droplet that needed to be well separated from the rest of my infrastructure, and ran into a confusing error message that was preventing it f…

> DO seems to have gone with the "hire cheap overseas support that almost but doesn't quite understand English" strategy, whereas the tier 1 guys at Linode have on occasion demonstrated more Linux systems administration expertise than I've got.

That's simply not true. There's support engineers hired around the world, and depending on when your ticket is posted, someone awake at that time will answer. DO is super remote friendly and as a result, has employees (and support folks) everywhere on the planet. Not "cheap oversea support" at all. There's a lot of support folks in the US, Canada, Europe, and in India where they have a datacenter.

disclosure: ex-employee

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#220

Post by williamstein »

znpy wrote: post #211
nurettin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 tireless hours of work (with lunch break) 15 minutes to Listen, understand and resolve an issue, assuming perfect knowledge, a lot of luck and normal human speed, that would still amount to less than 30 resolutions a day.

something's not clear: are you talking from direct experience ?

He's using mathematics to compute the number of tickets an employee can handle per day, given certain assumptions. Given the data from znpy above, we see that nurettin's assumption that the time per ticket is 15 minutes is inconsistent with DO's expectations; instead, the average time spent per ticket should be about 5 minutes.
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