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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#81

Post by syshum »

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.

The offerings of DO and others are simpliar

That is the target, AWS you need a math degree to understand the billing and even then you will never know exactly what you will be billed until you are actually billed...

This is not the case with DO and Linode

Sure for a large enterprise that needs that complexity and flexiblity to squeeze every penny out it would not be a good fit

but for SMB work loads, it is great

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#83

Post by neom »

tyingq wrote: post #79
yte14 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate attempt to take over the "shared Cpanel hosting" market with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for change...lots of little players.

The market was considerably too small and it would mean building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20 years" was the main north star.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#84

Post by covidthrow »

cube00 wrote: post #40

They lost me after I couldn't switch from CentOS unless I also agreed to lose my IP address. Reached out to support and got the unhelpful reply of "use another OS version within the CentOS family" which didn't really help considering CentOS was charging its direction.

They have "floating IP addresses" as droplet-agnostic IPs for exactly this purpose.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#85

Post by skrtskrt »

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.

As I started learning how to spin up and manage Linux servers and then deploy my own (unmanaged) k8s on them, half of my bookmarks are DO documentation.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#86

Post by eklavya »

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).

Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before they can sell it in the market.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#87

Post by mauflows »

ArtWomb wrote: post #11

Would be interesting to see App Platform growth numbers. Lot's of competition: Heroku, Netlify, Fly.io, App Engine, Cloud Run, etc. But they may have hit the sweet spot in terms of features and pricing.

The missing feature for me is more cache control. It's behind cloudflare but not configurable. So you can't cache json for instance

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#88

Post by fastball »

yte14 wrote: post #75
neom wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast becau…

You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here.

If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#89

Post by tyingq »

neom wrote: post #83
tyingq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate attempt to take over the "shared Cpanel hosting" market with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for change...lots of little players.

The market was considerably too small and it would mean building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20 years" was the main north star.

It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion / year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny, but it is highly fragmented.

And I think the solution could be layered on top of what they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons, icons, and little apps to create web server instances and tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basically just a consistent web app to put on top of their "droplet" ecosystem. Much of it already exists, so a fair amount of the effort would just be marketing it.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#90

Post by eljimmy »

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.

I've been using Linode for 7 years now and I've had very little downtime. Pretty reliable in my experience.

Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.

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