321–330 of 420 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically it's due to bad leadership and office politics... In other name incompetence?
Do you feel that any business that isn’t perfect is run incompetently?
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…
If they ramped that $5/month to $20/month after X months, I would keep paying it. Digital Ocean is a fantastic deal, everything I've tried straightforwardly works, and the fact that I can't accidentally spend money as I experiment is a real boon.
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…
Thanks for posting. I run browserless.io on DO, and want to keep it that way. Many have posted about about how they use DO for small projects, and I started that same way, but now it's the muscle behind a much bigger thing. Appreciate you chiming in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digital Ocean gives me peace of mind. Unlike Amazon or Google, I am confident I'm not going to get a $300k bill from DO overnight.
I'm still amazed that there's no billing cap in Amzn/Goog. Google tried to charge me $1000 for a service normally costing $1 / mo because of a runaway restart issue. I had a $2 / mo "max budget" on it and we responded within minutes of receiving a budget alert. I only got them to reverse the charge after doing a ton of work to prove that my team reacted in their budget alert that was more than 6 hours late. They stil…
To me, this says that the shortcoming has been noted, and then a product manager has argued against implementation. If I squint I can even justify it - shutting down a website right when it gets hugely popular is not something that's easily reversed, while it's pretty easy for GCP to write off a bill for $1k.
The tutorial's budget hard limit system is actually kinda interesting as it dogfoods GCP - the budget-hit notification is sent via GCP pubsub, and a lambda (aka Google Cloud Function) then removes the billing account from the project, which shuts down the project's resources.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
(To be clear, having to write/tweak code and deploy this myself is a suboptimal solution to the problem but it's neat from an engineering perspective.)
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…
I have not been at the company for 3+ years so want to make crystal clear I don’t know “intimately” what’s going on at the organization. With that said, I still know enough about the business to say the following.
Been reading about developers, business owners, etc worrying about your application stability or fearing the need to migrate to another infrastructure, all warrented feelings. I want to share some thoughts as an (old)insider.
DIGITALOCEAN IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE. You don’t make $200M+ in ARR and all of a sudden shutdown. Especially as a company who has always prioritized the BEST product experience. Prioritized the BEST customer experience. If you’ve been a customer of DO, you know they go above and beyond you. DigitalOcean’s offering is still by far the most developer-friendly and delightful infrastructure experience on the market.
One of my biggest frustrations when I worked there was the lack of advanced features offered for scaling applications, I'm shockingly surprised that in the past few years they quickly launched Kubernetes, Database as a service, and Object Storage, granted all table stake stuff that AWS already has, but nevertheless has made DigitalOcean a very mature product. I'm low-key annoyed they didn't launch this when customers were yelling at me as the customer success point person, begging for all these features...anyways good for those that are customers today :)
As the co-founder mentioned above, the business has gone through several CEO changes with the purpose of preparing for an even grander expansion. So far hasn't worked as planned. When leadership changes, rockiness always occurs, and it’s up to the next CEO to steer the ship. I don't know the new CEO and have no clue if he's any good, but I wish him good luck. Layoffs happen when businesses are tanking, but they also happen when a business is preparing for another launch at greatness. I'm truly empathetic to those that were laid off today, as a fellow DO-Shark that can't feel good. Even though you are likely folks I've never met, my thought are with you.
If you are a developer, DigitalOcean will always be a place for you to incubate, innovate, and grow your business. I'm confident of that.
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…
Thanks for posting. I run browserless.io on DO, and want to keep it that way. Many have posted about about how they use DO for small projects, and I started that same way, but now it's the muscle behind a much bigger thing. Appreciate you chiming in.
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…
Moisey, big fan of yours, always have been. DO's board has been atrocious (not you and Ben). The way they handled bonuses even the years that we were growing 40+% because we missed #'s due to factors outside any employees control, was a joke. The hiring of Mark Templeton was one of the absolute worst things that could have happened, he damn near put DO on the brink of destruction. That said, it seems like Yancey is d…
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…
In terms of similar competitor and ignoring those Cheap VPS, they started the whole $10 and later $5/month price plan. Linode has always maintained its $20 / Node starting price arguing for the exact reason you mentioned, Support Cost. And later DO / Linode became the price plan standards where everyone follows. I remember at the time I suggested $5 plan should be limited to 1 per account or only for non- public inte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IAM is a big no though.