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…
A customer's need for additional resources should translate to a price-point question, rather than to uncertainty about what they've already paid for.
> 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.
High IO doesn't always mean an instance was compromised.
There should be clearly defined limits, and/or a clearly defined throttling policy, and the customer should have the option to buy their way out. Amazon gets this right. There should be no guessing game about reasonable use, or goodwill.
> Those pwned customers are complaining and demanding that you fix it, and the regular customers are also upset because of slowness due to the "noisy neighbor" problem inherent to all VPSes.
High CPU load doesn't always mean an instance was compromised. If you've sold CPU resources, the customer is entitled to use them. Obvious example: build servers.
If other customers experience unacceptable degradation, that means you overpromised, or else your isolation solution isn't fit for service.
Again, Amazon gets this right. They're criticised for their complex billing schemes, sometimes rightly, but it clearly makes sense to measure and be explicit about all resource-consumption. They even have an elaborate scheme to incentivise customers to tame down their CPU usage, in the form of 'burstable performance instances'.
> Anyway, I do hope they can become profitable!
Agreed. It's good to have smaller players, not just the big three of Amazon/Google/Microsoft. Competing on price-point without having the same scale, must be really tough.