Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

digitalocean.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 194 posts

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#61

Post by toast0 »

brianwawok wrote: post #43
ceejayoz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is DNS failover not recommended?" http://serverfault.com/questions/60553/why-is-dns-failover-n... Among other things, IE7 will pin IPs for 30 minutes, non-browser clients may have serious issues, etc.

Yah for sure, it is not perfect but it is pretty good. In my use case, I don't support IE7 (won't work at all on my SAAS app), and I only support browser clients. I have simulated LB failures by killing nginx, and watched traffic flow over to the other LB without a big delay (in 30 seconds everyone was over). Fancier IP failover is nice for sure, and would let some more enterprisey people in.. but for a lot of apps o…

killing nginx is good for testing load balancer application crashed, but insufficient for testing load balancer host mysteriously vanished; for that I would set your firewall to drop incoming SYNs on the load balanced port. You'll have a much bigger client side delay when there's no response than when there's a quick port closed response.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#62

Post by timdorr »

icpmacdo wrote: post #2

I wonder if the this pushes there valuation over 1B, if so I think that means that Techstars is the first accelerator outside of YC to produce a unicorn. Personally I hope so, Digital Ocean is a great product and I think one of the really smart things they did was be generous with there free credits as it was at least a great way for me to get on there platform and later on drop a fair amount into hosting with them.

Probably not. Their previous round was $37.2m on a $153m post, so about 25% equity. Hosting is very low margin, so valuations trend lower than other businesses.

I would say $500m valuation, tops. Most likely <$400m.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#63

Post by Mahn »

astrodust wrote: post #44
dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

For all the money Linode has on hand, and the size of their technical team, it's absolutely insulting they haven't made any tangible improvement to their management front-end in at least five years, if not more. The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.

For what is worth, I've been a Linode customer for a few years and never really felt their management front-end was in urgent need of an update. It's solid and does the job for us. My only complains to be honest are 1) the lack of storage dedicated nodes, as OP points out, and 2) the price, it gets very expensive very fast as you scale and spin more nodes.

We are currently considering moving to dedicated machines but only because of 2), otherwise we would happily be their customer for life.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#64

Post by waffle_ss »

brianwawok wrote: post #20
vruiz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they implemented IP failover already? I haven't heard anything. Having your own LB without being able to fail over the IP is not HA. If the LB does down so does your business.

What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess…

> I guess client DNS retries takes a few seconds

Have you tested this in all the browsers? According to this ServerFault post[1], it could take minutes for an IP address to be considered "down" in Chromium before it cycles to the next one; Firefox apparently waits 20 seconds[2]. Those posts are dated 2011 but I can't imagine the behavior would've changed a whole lot since then. A user is not going to wait multiple minutes or even 20 seconds for a web page to render - it's effectively down.

IP failover with heartbeat or keepalived seems like a much better solution to me when feasible.

[1]: http://serverfault.com/a/328321/85897

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641937

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#66

Post by petercooper »

dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

I'm not saying you're wrong but I disagree from my own POV. It's a common play in the hosting business to grow big quickly then sell out to a more enterprisey company (as happened with EV1Servers, Softlayer, Heroku) and if DO is taking such large amounts of funding, something will have to happen (IPO, acquisition, etc) and some companies don't make the transition well (I'm not saying DO wouldn't, but you never know).

Linode, on the other hand, can remain a company focused on just being a long term business forever. They might move a little more conservatively, but they have owners with skin in the game and customers to keep happy. I use both DO and Linode, but Linode for my most critical stuff simply because I "feel" they're more likely to remain basically the same in 5 years' time and I value that consistency as a business.

I think DO is superb, I have great admiration for them and I recommend them a lot, but I also feel they're the riskier horse to back even if the potential upside is so much greater.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#68

Post by austenallred »

dotBen wrote: post #14

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a l…

When people ask, "Why does HN/the tech industry pay so much attention to the companies that are raising money?" I'll point them to this.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with bootstrapping and making a good living, but the stuff that goes big and wants to scale quickly usually has to raise a bunch of money to get there.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#69

Post by Mahn »

lsc wrote: post #48

hm. Interesting. From what I know of the industry, their size and pricing, I would have thought they would be profitable enough that raising this sort of money wouldn't be particularly interesting. Does this mean that they are operating at a loss?

I would be surprised if they didn't have a positive cash flow by now. It's probably more about growing faster than about having money per se.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#70

Post by nailer »

r0naa wrote: post #67

I love DO, they are doing great work. The only thing I regret is the relatively poor choice of platforms they support. For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.

Really? Do you have some stats on NixOS growth to support that?
Post reply on HN