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

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#81

Post by austenallred » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #73

austenallred wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure; Amazon putting data centers in glaciers or Google trying to float a ship out into the ocean to water cool it certainly seem like they could could provide either performance or prices an order of magnitude greater than what is currently available; the tricky part is building up enough steam that you can be trusted with enough cash to make that happen.

If nothing else, we all benefit from the prices. AWS is so cheap I barely have to think about it.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#82

Post by bluedino » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #66

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).…

>> 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 that's exactly what Slicehost did, years ago.

I wonder if Rackspace ever courted Linode. Slicehost always seemed to be the inferior one in price and performance.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#83

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #73

austenallred wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean when I think of economies of scale, I would name datacenters pretty high up on the list!

Thing of the googles and facebooks making their own servers instead of buying from off the shelf guys...

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#84

Post by brianwawok » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #61

brianwawok wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure, thanks for the tip!

Like I said in previous posts, I don't think it the end all rock solid load balancer answer. But I like to sleep through the night, and if having a short pause the one night a year a load balancer crash happens, my uptime is way higher than most of the internet.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#85

Post by jordanlev » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

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…

Funny... I remember when Linode first became really popular, it was right around the time Slicehost got bought (and subsequently shut down by) Rackspace. A lot of people moved over to Linode because Slicehost was no more (or when the writing was on the wall that it would soon become no more).

So perhaps you're correct that lack of funding is making Linode lazy now, but that doesn't mean that getting bought or accepting a bunch of money would solve the problem.

Side note: the original slicehost founders grew to regret their decision of selling to Rackspace, see: http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#86

Post by vruiz » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #37

vruiz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. How? How does the DNS client know that the IP no longer works? do browsers today have this mechanism? I'm not a network guy so perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the problem with DNS load balancing is that you can not invalidate the TTL on the client.

It is up to the client. But all of the clients (browsers) out there do more or less the same thing.. they try the first DNS record.. if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second, and so on - going down the list. TTL does not matter here because I am not yanking or adding to my DNS record. I am simply saying "Here are 3 servers.. try them in order until you find one that works". In practice, a helpful feature is a) M…

I'm not sure all clients will behave as you are experiencing. But in any case:

> if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second

That is not HA. Most people will not wait 30 seconds for a page to load. If your business looses money with every minute of downtime this is certainly not adequate. It's certainly not recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS#Drawbacks

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#87

Post by radlad » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #74

seunosewa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that networking is a pain point in terms of front-end interface. It's not horrid, but it could be improved.

I'd love to see them offer a storage solution as other commenters have mentioned.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#88

Post by jdoss » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #78

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 the…

Who do you use for a dedicated provider?

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#89

Post by damoncali » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

jordanlev wrote: post #85

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…

Funny... I remember when Linode first became really popular, it was right around the time Slicehost got bought (and subsequently shut down by) Rackspace. A lot of people moved over to Linode because Slicehost was no more (or when the writing was on the wall that it would soon become no more). So perhaps you're correct that lack of funding is making Linode lazy now, but that doesn't mean that getting bought or accepti…

Also, look what happened to Slicehost after acquisition. Rackspace woke up, realized Slicehost customers are cheap, and drove them off by raising prices.

Re: DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

#90

Post by protomyth » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

rafadc wrote: post #26

angersock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Digital Ocean supports FreeBSD ;)

and if you feel a bit daring http://www.tubsta.com/2015/04/openbsd-on-digital-ocean/