Omg!
Yesterday I read a post where the author admitted that if people believe it's an advert then it is because they want great people to come and work in the company.
https://blog.digitalocean.com/from-15-000-database-connectio...
DigitalOcean is laying off staff
91–100 of 420 posts
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#92Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…
They also have a referral program that turned DigitalOcean to free hosting for me. A few years ago I got annoyed with something, wrote an article about how to fix it using a DO instance, linked to DO with my referral code and racked up thousands of $ in a payout. I used most when experimenting and feeling too lazy to shut down instances(because I didn't want to go through backup since maybe I will use it later etc).
For 6-7 years now I'm using DO for free but my only resource-intensive instance is a personal VPN server that I use from time to time(a few hours a day maybe?).
At first, DO use to give referral payouts in cash, then they limited the payouts to credits, then changed the structure and introduced expiration date to these credits.
I would guess that this referral program that probably helped them a lot with the growth at first is now a burden.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.
I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.
I guess iCloud is hosted on AWS? I never actually looked. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for Apple though. And if it did happen I guess that wouldn't be so bad, I mean it could be worse. Oracle could decide to get into the cloud business by buying out DO.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#94Interesting story of Hyper-funded DigitalOcean vs Bootstrapped Linode
Wow, didn't realize linode is bootstrapped. How did they manage to build so many cloud centers with no investment? Do you know more of their story?
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#95Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…
I like how simple their API is. I have infrequent cloud needs, so it's nice being able to set up a simple docker-machine script once in a while to spin up a ton of compute nodes for some scientific task.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#96Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…
I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes."
I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most.
I get that it can be a brutal, low-margin business, but I also wonder how many "small" customers are extremely high-margin like me, and whether that can aggregate into a better overall margin than you might guess?
Or will you always have a few outliers running at capacity and calling the help desk and blowing out your margins?
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#97Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…
DO makes a great product. I've been using them for many years and I hope that they succeed. I've used other hosts in the past and had nothing but trouble. Joyent ended one of their hosting plans and I had to migrate EVERYTHING which took forever. Then Rimuhosting had an actual hardware failure that resulted in non-reproducible errors happening very frequently - that company nearly brought down my whole business. Then…
Interesting, could you tell us more about your experience with Joyent?
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#98Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
The line of credit is used to finance equipment and has a fixed payback period.
They have only raised around 100M in equity investment from VCs. The last being 83M in 2015. This is the money which requires multiples.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#99I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly. Cloud resources should be a commodity. Providers should offer compute resources, persistent storage, load balancers, and MAYBE a small handful of other services. The way Digital Ocean succeeds against AWS is by aligning itself with this idea, and competing on specialization. Forget competi…
I think they would benefit a lot from adding a thin Heroku-like PaaS layer while keeping the option to "build from scratch".
They're working on this. I was just asked to do a survey about my "team's" PaaS usage and offered an invitation to a working group scheduled later this month.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.
I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.
> I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other
Companies buy competitors all the time.