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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#301

Post by steve_adams_86 »

alexis_fr wrote: post #267
busymom0 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this! As someone who spends okay amount of money on DO ($40, $15, $5, $5), the title of the post gave me a bit of a scare but your comment helped me calm back down. Thank you! I used to be with AWS before (still use their S3) but now I have switched from EC2 to DO droplets. Only thing I am missing with DO is the ability to set up ACL on the firewall itself so it can only be reached via cloudflare and th…

$140 user here. I need DO to stay online for its simplicity. I simply don’t understand AWS and I’m too scared to wreak a subnet while trying to add lambdas and API Gateways. I wouldn’t mind spending double if necessary. Also, clicking in Create Droplet then on a big « $10, xGB RAM » button is incredibly clear to me. Then I « ansible » it and it’s live. Please don’t add too many services to Digital Ocean ;)

I put a lot of work into understanding AWS and gave it an honest try for 6 months or so, and ended up realizing it's an approach to solving a problem that simply doesn't jive with me. I went back to DO, and it made both personal sense for me and economic sense for the product.

It's obviously an incredible platform with excellent tooling, and it probably powers most of the websites I use. But like most trades the same job can be done to a similar standard at a variety of scales using wildly different processes and tooling. And that's fine. The economics seem to be inverted (AWS is large scale and quite expensive in my experience while DO is smaller and cheaper), but it's also not a perfect analogy. I just won't begrudge anyone for using a tool or process I don't love. If it gets your blog or multi-million dollar revenue product online, that's awesome.

I'm glad I can say I used some AWS stuff on my resume, but for my own work I'd only use it if it had a clear advantage over whatever else I'm using.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#302

Post by xenihn »

icebraining wrote: post #286
Proziam wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye'…

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60. It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

This discussion could be easily settled by comparing the grace period to the ones provided by Vultr and Linode. Then compare all of them to Amazon, which I would bet blows everyone else out.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#303

Post by xenihn »

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.

Uber layoffs last year were the first big tech ones I think.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#304

Post by sillysaurusx »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #268
sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

Did they attempt to contact you in those 5 weeks? A lot of people seem willing to blame you without knowing the answer to this question. On a different note, this kind of thing is probably one of the top threats to the survivability of a cloud-powered site or service. Alongside vandalism by disgruntled (ex-)employees, I imagine it happens far more often than outages in cloud providers' infrastructure.

They did. My issue was the timing. They turned off the server and deleted everything, including the backups, in a single day.

In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#305

Post by beatgammit »

treebornfrog wrote: post #188
donarb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has their own competitive service against DigitalOcean called Lightsail. Their cheapest plan is $3.50 month (512MB/20GB SSD), the bigger plans are roughly similar in pricing and features to DigitalOcean.

The irony of this article is that current customers like myself who read this news are now looking at alternatives. I spend roughly $120/m with DO and have done for the last 2 years. I have a majority 5 usd droplets and 1 20 usd droplet. LightSail may be the way to go for now. Here comes all the migration work.. Fun :)

Why migrate? Afaict, Digital Ocean isn't going anywhere, it's mostly internal restructuring. I'm sure you posted before the comment by one of the cofounders, so definitely give it a read before you make any decisions.

Personally, I have more instances on vultr and linode, but I still keep an instance at DO so I have a reason to keep tabs on them. I have no qualms about recommending their service to others.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#306

Post by beatgammit »

frandroid wrote: post #122
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…

At $275m in sales they're already a drop in the AWS/GCE/Azure buckets though...

Sure, but they're still big enough to maneuver well against competitors. I see them competing more with the likes of Vultr and Linode than AWS/Azure/GCE.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#307

Post by steve_adams_86 »

lozaning wrote: post #133
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…

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.

I've sat in on some really gross calls in which my CTO at the time berated DO support for issues that didn't _really_ exist in an attempt to get better rates, or practically yelled at them when minor hiccups occurred in our infrastructure. It was very painful to sit in on. They were remarkably patient and cool about it. I suspect there are many people like him out there sucking up their time and resources.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#308

Post by kevindong »

For my hobby projects, I strongly prefer DigitalOcean's $5/month droplet to Amazon's EC2 t2.nano instance (their lowest-resourced offering; ~$4.18/month) purely because I know that I can't screw up the DigitalOcean configs badly enough to get an unexpectedly enormous bill. For simple stuff, the DigitalOcean UI is just so much easier to navigate than the enterprisy AWS console.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#309

Post by ptcampbell »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #298
raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

This doesn’t really track as an explanation. Why couldn’t you restructure teams or retrain people instead of firing them? If it was an internal organizational conflict as you say, it seems rash and strategically unsound to let good people go instead of refactoring the internal conflict in a way that deploys those people in other roles, or at least some of them. While I don’t think there is anything deceptive or mean-…

Not that we are owed an explanation, but I didn’t see a reason either.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#310

Post by rolltiide »

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

yeah, forever-jobs are the main misaligned expectation from the market. laying off people isn't controversial, but too many businesses avoid the action until there actually is a controversial issue with the business.
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