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$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#81

Post by DanielDent »

joering2 wrote: post #52
DanielDent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards." Far more egregious is that they silently drop port 25 on IPv6. This means that enabling IPv6 will cause mail problems for some destinations (destinations that support IPv6, like Google). When asked they say it's because a /64 is too much address space in the…

I can't talk about port 25, but we have 15 mailservers hosted on $5/per pop with DigitalOcean and with properly setup rDNS and SPF including our IPv6 address, we don't see any problems with deliveribility to gmail via subscription port. That is on circa 600,000 emails per month sent to gmail.

You send server-to-server messages on port 587? That is... non-standard. But an interesting approach.

You are using your users' gmail credentials? Or are you simply delivering over 587 the same as you would over 25?

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#82

Post by zanewill9 »

pcote wrote: post #73

>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies. I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses. That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any s…

This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few startups that were caught off-guard.

AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#83

Post by amorphid »

iolothebard wrote: post #45
curun1r wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders trying to bootstrap a company without external funding are SOL. It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more…

BizSpark requires a 5 minute write up. It's comically easy to get accepted as an individual if you can string together a few sentences. Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.

If you want to use Microsoft Software, BizSpark is great. I've signed up a couple times for a couple different entrepreneurial endeavors of mine. Super easy. Always free.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#84

Post by DanielDent »

rdtsc wrote: post #41
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specific to VM images. "Custom" here means "not baked into Xen," since your filesystem is not considered when spawning a domU kernel except in limited circumstances. In the Xen world, your kernel is provided by your hosting provider. You can apt-get all day and nothing will happen. That is what custom means in this context. "Not yours." Read accordingly; you've made the same flawed point at several spots in this…

Ah, I understand now, thanks for explaining. I thought they used KVM for some reason... But I guess if they use Xen they yeah, they are stuck with whatever kernel they get.

I've got both Xen & KVM systems under my care.

It's no longer true that Xen needs to mean managing the kernel outside the VM. PVGRUB can be specified as the 'kernel' to boot, which will chainload a grub which can be managed inside the VM, which lets you run any kernel you wish and manage the boot process as you would on a non-virtualized system.

Amazon uses Xen for their EC2 product, and as I understand they too now set people up with pvgrub.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#85

Post by assocguilt »

bmh_ca wrote: post #80

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people hav…

Odd use of the word ecumenical.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#86

Post by andrewsomething »

mattkrea wrote: post #75
andrewsomething wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'd love to hear your feedback about our documentation. I work with the team that produces our tutorials. Are there areas you don't think we cover well, or is it something else? With 1,200+ tutorials, our docs are actually something I'm extremely proud of, but we're always looking to improve.

Your tutorials are awesome and while you may not even see this I would love for someone at DO to get on blob storage. If that was available I could move a lot of things over ($25k/mo on AWS currently). Load balancers and VPCs are also nice but blob storage is a killer.

Thanks!

Storage and networking are both areas we're investing a lot of work into right now. Blob storage isn't the first on the roadmap on the storage side, but I'll definitely pass on this feedback.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#87

Post by lobster_johnson »

andrewsomething wrote: post #61
tshtf wrote: post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

There seems to be a bit of confusion about how we handle kernels at DO. Hopefully I can clear things up a bit. On newer distro versions (e.g. Ubuntu >= 15.04, Debian 8, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) we no longer use "external" kernels. You are free to compile and use custom kernels. We're happy with what we've seen, and with Ubuntu 16.04 around the corner our default distribution will have support for this as well. After…

Are you planning to offer storage options? I find it's ridiculous to have to upgrade to a higher CPU/RAM plan (or add a new node) just because we're running out of disk space. We don't need detachable volumes or anything fancy, just the ability to increase the amount of disk storage.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#88

Post by shoyer »

assocguilt wrote: post #85
bmh_ca wrote: post #80

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people hav…

Odd use of the word ecumenical.

I'm pretty sure the OP intended to write "economical" instead.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#89

Post by bnchrch »

bmh_ca wrote: post #80

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people hav…

I don't understand why you would feel slighted, this is just a business partnership (albiet a large one) and no different than when Microsoft offered $500, 000 in azure credits to YC companies. There are certain perks to joining an organization of entrepreneurs and developers, this is one of them.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#90

Post by nhangen »

bmh_ca wrote: post #80

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people hav…

Absolutely. This reads like a big fuck you to anyone that chooses to go it alone and/or doesn't want to submit themselves to the YC complex.
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