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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#61

Post by invisiblea »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes C…

I'm _really_ disappointed with the managed DB service. The "75 simultaneous connections per gigabyte of usable memory" limitation means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#62

Post by neom »

yte14 wrote: post #54
neom wrote: post #32

Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days, lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think everyone involved knew this day would com…

The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it appl…

Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about. DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#63

Post by csmiller »

cat199 wrote: post #52
sithlord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be a giant investor, ie a bank. IPOs are there for banks to be able to buy up shares at a low price, then dump it when retail investors get their turn to run it up before banks sell off.

another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain access to more wealth: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... 200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).

I think you can just take the Series 65 and be good to go these days

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#64

Post by tw04 »

yannoninator wrote: post #5

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

Do you think Kia or Toyota (the brand, not the company) have a long term play, or is everyone going to shift to Lexus, Mercedes and BMW?

Not everyone is interested in paying the exhorbitant pricing the big cloud providers charge, regardless of features.

Now they might get acquired by the big boys and run under their existing brands as a low cost alternative. But the services aren't going away. I'm willing to bet the big guys want nothing to do with them though. It'll just eat into their margin.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#65

Post by jakelazaroff »

gizmo wrote: post #9

Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of premium we've seen from other tech IPOs. A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in onl…

I wonder what the distribution of revenue per customer looks like. I bet (hope?) that at the low end there are a lot of consumers who set up a $5 droplet to tinker around for a few months without doing much more, and that the revenue figures are propped up by a small group of bigger customers spending much more.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#66

Post by coder543 »

invisiblea wrote: post #61
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes C…

I'm _really_ disappointed with the managed DB service. The "75 simultaneous connections per gigabyte of usable memory" limitation means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.

> means cost wise it's cheaper just to spin up a 'real' database droplet.

This is the case for literally every managed database service that I'm aware of.

You pay a premium for the managed aspect.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#67

Post by nickjj »

I've been using DO for around 6-7 years now. Really happy with the services overall. I hope nothing changes after IPO'ing.

The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around for folks using Spaces. I'm looking forward to the day where Spaces is as good as S3 because DO's offering of Spaces includes not only an object store but a free CDN on top. Seems like a good deal for $5 bucks a month if it were dependable.

It's weird because every other service I use by DO has been top notch.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#68

Post by bithavoc »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #55
bithavoc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. You can’t upload a custom image and assign a Floating IP to the Droplet, one of the most basic of the functionality of any cloud.

Just double-checked my DO console — yes you can, I have a droplet with both. Edit: I'm wrong, see below.

Maybe we're talking about different things, docs here[0]

> You cannot assign a Floating IP to a Droplet created from a custom image.

Edit: I wanted to double-check because this would make my life so much easier, but no, I still can't use Floating IP with Custom Images. I imported a FlatcarLinux image from a URL and created a droplet; once the droplet launched, I still see this:

> Floating IP: Disabled

> Public IPv6 Address: Not available with custom images.

[0]https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/custom-images/

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#69

Post by wrycoder »

breck wrote: post #44

Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean customer: . Those are the ones just off the top of my head. Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the past near decade. Excited to see they are financially very healthy.

The only issue I've ever had is the login auth email can take 20 minutes to arrive at fastmail. This seems to have gotten better lately.

What a great service!!

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#70

Post by 52-6F-62 »

staticautomatic wrote: post #33
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes C…

They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.

They really do. And it goes in tangents and details I wouldn't have expected. Their support is great.
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