DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#71

Post by CoachRufus87 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #54

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider that to be a big enough risk to not deploy production apps in their environment? I.e. having your app on 1 droplet and a dedicated db on another. I'm new to ops and trying to learn all that I can :)

I do this in prod, you just need to take extra steps to protect. i.e. make a firewall rule on the database to only allow access to the database port on your private network card, from your specific web IPs (and make sure the traffic is encrypted).

Thanks for the info!

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#72

Post by dubcanada » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #46

Has anyone used Vultr.com? I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).

I've used them. Their control panel is not as pretty, and their community is not as large. But the product is arguably better, they offer things that DO doesn't offer like DYO ISO, daily backups for the same cost as DO's weekly (seriously DO, only weekly backups???), and a ton more.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#73

Post by petercooper » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #68

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.

That's true, but IMHO hosting is not a service that benefits significantly from economies of scale beyond a certain (though reasonably high) point. Would Linode be any better for me as a customer if it were immediately 3x the size? I'm not sure. As a customer, would I prefer a Linode that were 10x the size and having to head for an "exit" of some kind? No way.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#74

Post by kawsper » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

seunosewa wrote: post #59

astrodust wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps users don't have any complaints about their management interface? Do you? Perhaps users mostly want performance and value which have been greatly improved by their substantial infrastructure upgrades?

Yes.

Their IP Failover is really badly documented and hard to work with.

Their Nodebalancers are noticeably slow, the interface is alright, but you are better off setting up your own loadbalancer.

I feel that static networking could be made easier, and more automatic when I am adding a new node.

Their stackscripts should be able to receive parameters for when it is running, and the error-reporting should be better. I had issues where my scripts wouldn't run and I had no idea why.

Other than that, I am a happy customer.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#75

Post by arca_vorago » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

Slightly offtopic, but I am curious if anyone has any insights into the legal side of hosting profit seeking services on top of VPS's in general. Is the boilerplate contract(s)/eula/tos good enough generally or do you seek to actually make changes to a custom one?

What about hosting websites vs reselling access for some other purpose (eg. similar to game hosting services that allow full customer control of the instance?)

It seems to me like there is a lot of room for a tool that can spin up an instance over multiple VPS providers, because sometimes one will have a colo close to where you want and sometimes another will.

Anyone aware of comprehensive location based benchmarking of all the VPS's?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#76

Post by sbarre » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

gsharma wrote: post #49

proksoup wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DO's UX is a game changer, I personally think is why they have been so successful in what seemed like a crowded market with the "same" business model as the others.

Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS. On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.

You said it yourself when you mentioned the marketing and the community and the customer guides. User Experience is not just web interfaces, it's the whole user experience (man....) and that includes onboarding, self-service, support, learning and all the other small touches that make it a satisfying experience to be a DO customer.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#77

Post by NiftyFifty » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

My only question, is the investment rounds the new form of private equity bubble fixing? How diversified are these investments and how does the interoperations of a company get changes to meet the revenue influx to ROI? I never really got this jist and how culture DOES change by these rounds. The pitches must damn near printing money kind of stuff made of magic Mike XXL and pixie dust to stick.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#78

Post by chrismarlow9 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running.

I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way they setup for me to use the service and not have a fear of lockin. Does it take me 3 or 4 days to get new boxes? Yes. Is it causing a massive headache for me? No, because I plan things and order them ahead of time.

Just my 2 cents, I know others who use DO and love it.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#79

Post by ape4 » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

I'd like a harddrive option. To get a large amount of storage is way too expensive.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#80

Post by arca_vorago » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #9

buckbova wrote: post #3

I've got two droplets now, one for email/owncloud and another for personal projects with automated backups. It's pretty easy to use, but I worry I don't have the sysadmin chops to keep it secure. Edit: I followed tutorials on auto-updating packages through cron, securing ssh, and setting up ufw for only services needed when I set it up. It's been about 2 years now so maybe I shouldn't worry.

Would anybody be interested in esoteric hosting? Think Linode, but specifically for FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Plan9/TempleOS/MinuetOS/etc.?

I've been thinking about using DFlyBSD as a host platform for such things, given some of it's awesome networking/virtualization features.