
DigitalOcean is laying off staff - progapandist
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/17/digitalocean-layoffs/
======
raiyu
Hey folks,

Cofounder of DigitalOcean here.

Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are
a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing
a larger number.

Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here.

We are not prepping the company for sale.

As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in
the past 18 months and leadership changes that created competing directions in
the business, which Yancey our new CEO, is now addressing.

We are not running out of money, nor do we have an immediate need to raise
capital, and the lay-offs aren't related to any sort of "cost-cutting".

We last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to
raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have
been since our founding.

There are no profitability issues with $5/mo customers as the unit economics
are the same as larger accounts. As we have grown we have added more products
and features so that scaling teams and companies can also be successful on
DigitalOcean, but we are not changing our commitment to the individual
developer and those who are just getting started.

Lastly, it pains me to see people let go, having been on both sides of the
table, it honestly just really sucks.

~~~
hashhar
DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college
graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire
backends.

Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper
production-like benchmarks for my own learning.

Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and
started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them on).

And now with the new managed offerrings for the CORE technologies people need
(databases, caches, K8S etc.) I'm happy to see that I can start being a little
more productive with my side projects.

So, in essence I want to thank the people at DigitalOcean for what they've
built and continue to build.

~~~
raiyu
Thank you for sharing.

Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with
technology.

The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by
Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a
liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get
another job.

I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I
would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when
DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made.

Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of
building "community".

She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to
build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that
team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as
Hacktoberfest.

So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources,
but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an
expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person.

That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those
individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at
DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean
in the first place.

~~~
hashhar
I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those
amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was.

It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the
awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say
that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an
integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a
tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that
they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing.

I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most
developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there
must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each
company and took DO for granted.

It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and
instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team
specially.

Also, have a great weekend.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to
> those amazing tutorials and documentations.

Seconded.

~~~
swuecho
more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.

~~~
tracker1
I've actually added the site into searches for some things, since the
tutorials are usually better. Though some should maybe be updated to current
versions now and then, it's still overall much better than the rest of the
internet in general.

------
Meekro
Digital 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 broken
programs running that chew through this precious resource for no reason. If
you throttle them, they'll complain.

Then there's the support. Handling a support ticket costs you at least $3 in
salary and benefits (remember, your typical customer pays $5/mo), and people
will demand that you help them fix their broken MySQL server or whatever.
They'll yell and threaten when you tell them that this is outside the scope of
what you can do.

And don't forget security. Your customers will install broken-ass Wordpress
sites and forget to upgrade them for 5 years. Then a worm sweeps through and
now a whole bunch of them have been pwned and are mining cryptocurrency. Those
pwned customers are complaining and demanding that you fix it, and the regular
customers are also upset because of slowness due to the "noisy neighbor"
problem inherent to all VPSes.

Speaking of which, preventing one VPS from hogging all the CPU or disk
bandwidth is harder than it looks. The two dominant software platforms are Xen
and KVM, and neither gives you great tools for dealing with disk bandwidth.
Limiting CPU is much easier, but there's still the problem that you're
overselling. Which is fine until half the VPSes on your machine are trying to
mine Ethereum.

On the bright side: half your customers will buy the VPS, leave it running,
and forget about it for years at a time. That's what makes the $5/mo business
model work out.

Anyway, I do hope they can become profitable! They run a much better operation
than the incumbents they replaced (slicehost, etc).

~~~
JDiculous
How is AWS so profitable then?

~~~
mywittyname
They charge you for _everything_. Data transfer in: charge, data transfer out:
charge, DNS lookup: charge, storing a file: charge, etc.

It's one of those situations where it's a death by a thousand cuts. When
you're cost provisioning, you can figure out the big stuff, i.e., we need 25
EC2s m4a.2xlarge instances with 40TB of S3 storage, and a 2TB Aurora instance.
But once you get the bill, you start seeing the costs of ELBs, NAT gateways,
inter-region transfers, etc. Individually, these costs aren't significant, but
in aggregate, they can make up a health chunk of your monthly bill.

Plus, their managed solutions are fucking expensive. We moved a self-managed
ELK cluster to an AWS-managed one and the costs went up by a factor of two.

~~~
JDiculous
This is why I don't use AWS for personal projects (S3 is the only one I'd
consider using). EC2 for example is significantly more expensive than a
Digital Ocean droplet.

~~~
banana_giraffe
Even S3 can hit random expenses when you least expect it. I let a process go
crazy and create billions of objects in S3. Of course AWS was happy to charge
me for all of this, but what I wasn't expecting was the charge just to list
the objects to delete them. I spent more than $100 just to empty the stupid
bucket out.

------
Townley
I'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 competing with lambda; let me
run my own serverless application. Don't worry about IAM; let me configure
LDAP. Don't waste developer hours on service-ifying the latest NoSQL storage
trend; write high-quality tutorials explaining how users can do it themselves.

And most importantly, continue to invest into open source and community
resources. There are developers willing to fight the good fight against
proprietary walled gardens like AWS/GCP/Azure, but it has to get easier.
Configuring HA postgres is harder than paying for RDS. Paying for GKE is more
feature complete than using rancher or kubeadm to make my own kubernetes
cluster. This friction is an existential threat when Azure can make my
problems go away for cash.

I don't know if Digital Ocean can succeed against the big cloud providers, but
if they do it won't be because they made a better platform; it'll be by
playing a totally different game.

~~~
sparkling
I think they would benefit a lot from adding a thin Heroku-like PaaS layer
while keeping the option to "build from scratch".

~~~
christophilus
That’s why they acquired Nanobox, presumably.

~~~
sparkling
Never heard about Nanobox up until now. Interesting, let's see what comes out
of that.

------
dothrowaway
(Throwaway, obviously)

I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the
primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that
obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening
the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's
going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a
ton this year, so that jives.

~~~
ogre_codes
It could easily be both a re-org and dressing the profitability numbers
prepping for a sale.

The fact that its mostly management is encouraging though.

~~~
peteradio
I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.

~~~
enos_feedler
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.

~~~
jandrese
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.

~~~
kickopotomus
If I remember correctly, iCloud is actually hosted by Google.

~~~
ogre_codes
This was never the case. They are self hosted and for a while they hosted a
fair bit of data on Azure & AWS. Not sure if they still use Azure and AWS, but
iCloud has never been on Google's infra. (Other Apple content has been served
by Google at various times, maps being the big/ obvious one)

~~~
kickopotomus
As of 2018, I believe they moved it to Google[1][2].

[1]: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google-
clo...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google-cloud-
platform-icloud-confirmation)

[2]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-
googl...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-google-cloud-
for-icloud.html)

~~~
ksec
They are hosted on all three, AWS, GCP, and Azure as well as on their own
Server in their own DC.

------
wgerard
This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings -
whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many
AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work.

That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes
feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just
using one of the major cloud providers.

~~~
chadlavi
I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of
the fact that they have such good UX.

~~~
davnicwil
Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is
definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything
'official' \- it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it
seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter
intuitive effect.

~~~
ludamad
Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What
people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible
with it

~~~
davnicwil
Oh completely agree, not at all saying using old tech is bad in any way and
it's completely clear why offical public service stuff prefers it. Just saying
it's interesting how this then makes old-looking stuff seem more official,
because you're used to everything official generally looking about 10 years
old.

------
rgbrenner
Everyone 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 given their past fund raising,
and how long its been), why would they want to sell more of their business?

They may also want to finally go public. 8 years is a long time to wait for a
return. And it seems to me the stock market is tired of these unprofitable
unicorns doing IPOs (at the moment anyway).

~~~
ttul
You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and
their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in
X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in
the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same
time period.

I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that
Digital Ocean is having a hard time vs. just restructuring to do some
housekeeping... I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the
same world as AWS these days.

~~~
Matheus28
> I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as
> AWS these days.

They aren’t competing in the same space

~~~
RussianCow
They most certainly are, especially given the managed products DO has
introduced recently (object storage, DB, Kubernetes, and load balancer). They
definitely want a slice of Amazon's pie.

~~~
Matheus28
DO is still far from being a “premium” provider. Sure they’re starting to
offer a subset of AWS services, but if you compare their prices, they aren’t
aiming for the same type of costumers.

Easiest way to compare is bandwidth costs: AWS/Azure/Google Cloud charge
around $0.05/GB at their cheapest prices. DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr charge
around $0.005/GB (and it comes with a VPS bundled).

If you’re doing anything bandwidth intensive (several PB a month), one is
viable, the other is not

------
wakatime
WakaTime switched to DigitalOcean and we're loving their performance to cost
ratio. Their compute droplet machines are much better than AWS ec2[1],
especially if you need low-latency SSD IOPs. The only AWS services we still
use are S3 and Route53, because S3's performance is better than Spaces[2].
Really hope this doesn't spell bad weather ahead.

[1] DigitalOcean Droplets > AWS Ec2 (based on our production metrics)

[2] AWS S3 > DigitalOcean Spaces (based on our production metrics)

~~~
bob1029
I tell you what... If it weren't for Route53 being as good as it is and
getting all of our domains sucked into it's gaping maw, we would be much more
likely to hop to different cloud vendors. It is very nice having the entire
enterprise tech stack managed through a single vendor when you are a tiny
company like we are.

That said, I am losing patience with how slow the EC2 instances are
considering what we pay. I've got management asking increasingly-probing
questions about our monotonically-incrementing AWS bill. All of this would be
fine if perceived/actual performance weren't also dropping for us over time
(I.e. intel spectre mitigations). I can almost feel how the AMZN profit
margins are squeezing us at this point... It's almost a weekly conversation
now with Azure or even a return to on-prem being brought up. "Do we move now
or later? Is the frying pan hot enough yet?"

Our organization is small enough to comfortably fit onto a single 2S 128 core
AMD Rome system. Why shouldn't we just lease out a half-rack somewhere local
(I.e. near the developers who can care for it) and then stick a few of their
systems, a switch, router and management hardware in there? This all began on-
prem with us moving to AWS, and after 6 years in the cloud circus it's
starting to feel like a safe place to return to. Perhaps we will just move our
compute to on-prem and continue to use AWS for backups and DNS. All I know is
my TR 2950X workstation can compile our solution ~10x faster than our Jenkins
server which is running on a T2.Large. Imagine giving Jenkins 32 Rome cores.
This is something we could actually afford if we owned the hardware.

There are also some other compelling factors for us to consider moving back
on-prem. Emerging technologies like Blazor create a strong argument for
keeping your workers near the datacenter. Very few businesses truly require
more than 1 physical datacenter. Yes, you might also have a DR site, but you
can arguably run all of the functions for 95%+ of businesses out of a single
physical location. Also, having a physical location where you can hook up any
arbitrary hardware means we could also pull our iOS build machine in-house and
use proper high-end Apple hardware on the same local network as the rest of
our infrastructure.

~~~
yowlingcat
For what it's worth, I think that was the premise of hybrid on-prem and
multicloud. If you can trade-off availability in your stateless compute and
worker layer and you're fine mostly managing it on prem, the cost savings
could be very compelling. However, you'll still pay for bandwidth, which is
the real killer and recurring expenditure. At the end of the day, there's no
getting around that unless you move fully to your own metal, but then you'll
likely realize costs related to maintaining your own metal that made you want
to switch to the cloud in the first place. One way you might try to test this
out is by using bare metal AWS instances -- if it's going on the right
direction but you want more savings, you could move to using AWS Outposts with
your on prem metal.

Just to make some conjecture here, I think that there's a difference between
not liking the market's prices and thinking that the market is mispriced.
Another commentator's point that the difference in bandwidth between
AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI and DO/etc being a factor of 10x should give you an idea of
some of the price discrimination going on.

------
erikrothoff
We just switched to DO thanks to their Hatch program. The support they have
shown and the energy we’ve been getting from the people at DO has been next-
to-none. Obviously it’s concerning to see people being laid off, and my
thoughts and concerns go to those who are facing what is probably their worst
days. Based on the stated reasoning from corporate I can’t say anything other
than I believe them. They have been releasing so many great things recently,
and looking at the number of open-source projects on Github it seems that the
proof of a flat organisation is in the pudding. We’re spending +1.5k USD
monthly and based on their product roadmap shared with us developers I have no
reason to doubt that we’ll be moving more of our infrastructure to DO soon.

We used to be on Linode and they were great too. The competition has really
forced them to up their game and start innovating. The segment is vibrant and
the cash is there. I’m not worried.

------
zacharybk
Lots of <3 to the DO-crew...For anyone looking for work, I put together a post
with resoures / thoughts on starting a job search.

[https://customerexperience.substack.com/p/find-your-dream-
jo...](https://customerexperience.substack.com/p/find-your-dream-job)

\- Zach (Former DO employee)

------
grive
The RGPD wall of Techcrunch is a real put-off (Choice partners that cannot be
deactivated, IAB partners that must be unsubscribed from the third party
website (which _of course_ does not work), seriously?). No reason to accept
this cancer, I will read about this subject elsewhere.

~~~
csunbird
I stopped clicking on techcrunch links a long time ago for same reason. I am
pretty sure that wall is not GDPR compliant, because the way to opt-out is not
simple and straightforward.

~~~
PeterisP
And of course, GDPR is all about opt-in, not opt-out. The only statement that
applies to opting out is 'withdrawing consent shall be as easy as granting
it', which of course applies only after you've intentionally, explicitly
granted opt-in consent.

------
ogre_codes
I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning.
As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells:

> In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO
> last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while
> since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean
> last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed amount from Mighty Capital, Glean
> Capital, Viaduct Ventures, Black River Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital,
> Torch Capital and EG Capital Advisors.

Nothing in particular, but finance guys and VCs tend to squeeze companies dry
or push hard for acquisitions. Hopefully I'm wrong here.

~~~
wastedhours
Might there be an opening bell in their future... almost entirely likely.

~~~
esdott
This exactly. I’m too tired to do some basic googling for citations but
anecdotally speaking, I believe hiring financial oriented leadership like this
and trimming the organization of “perceived” fat (management) is right out of
the going public playbook.

------
gist
> DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275M in [annual
> recurring revenues] and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new
> organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth
> by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world.”

If not obvious this can be translated as positioning the company so it can be
acquired by a larger entity for it's customer base and remaining employees.

> It says it works with more than 1 million developers across 195 countries.

I always love marketing statements like this. For sure 1 million is a large
number. But what makes someone a 'developer'? It's not something defined like
'Physician' or 'Pilot' or 'Attorney' which require some type of certification
to use the title. To DO (in terms of the marketing) a 'developer' is almost
certainly only someone who signed up for an account and perhaps (as with other
web properties) multiple accounts.

(I have used DO and was happy although I don't have a need for what they offer
anymore).

~~~
fareesh
If they're counting accounts it's definitely much lower. Our firm manages web
applications / web services / websites for multiple clients and they all have
their own DO account and there isn't 1 developer per account.

We were pretty excited to become part of their partner program but after
signing up we realized that if we onboarded new clients we'd have to do it all
under a single account, which sadly doesn't work for us because extremely
delayed payments are very common, and we'd be fronting hosting costs for
everyone.

------
networkimprov
DO will be just fine when GCP closes a few years hence, which Alphabet
accidentally "announced".

[https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-
ambitio...](https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitious-
goal-and-possible-deadline-for-gcp)

~~~
zomglings
It seems insane for them to even be speaking about that internally given that:

1\. It could scare away enterprise customers who look for reliability on a
much longer timescale.

2\. The extent of their investment into hiring for GCP. [1]

More likely the author of that article is trying to manufacture news.

[1] [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-single-largest-
dr...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-single-largest-driver-
headcount-growth-google/)

------
treebornfrog
Sucks. Hope it's not financial. I run a bunch of projects on DO, much prefer
it over AWS. It's easier to use and straight to the point.

------
gramakri
I love DO, been a customer for over 10 years. Maybe just me, but apart from
AWS, it's the only cloud provider that has competent support team. Azure,
Google Cloud are mostly unreachable. But raise a DO support request and you
get a response in 1 hour!

------
kevindong
For my hobby projects, I strongly prefer DigitalOcean's $5/month droplet to
Amazon's EC2 t2.nano instance (their lowest-resourced offering; ~$4.18/month)
purely because I know that I can't screw up the DigitalOcean configs badly
enough to get an unexpectedly enormous bill. For simple stuff, the
DigitalOcean UI is just so much easier to navigate than the enterprisy AWS
console.

------
jiofih
While better pricing is always nice, I really wish they would refocus on the
user experience in their platform. When adding up droplets + storage + LB +
database, the price difference is there, but mostly you don’t feel it’s worth
it - you still have to do configure everything yourself. If they offered
something more akin to Heroku or Now I’d be jumping all over it.

~~~
mmcwilliams
Based on user surveys I've completed for them, it seems they are at least
exploring the idea of releasing a Heroku-like service.

------
hiphipjorge
Slightly unrelated, but does anyone actually use DO in production?

We're on GKE and with their new Kubernetes offering, I've considered switching
but just haven't talked to a single person who uses it in production at work.

------
0xADADA
All that ops automation they were working on finally comes to fruition.
Automation creates surplus labor, and that surplus is realized with the
elimination of humor labor, reaping profit in the form of lowering costs.

------
ededdeddie38
FULL DISCLOSURE - My name is Edward, I was one of the earliest team members at
DigitalOcean and lead the customer success organization there in the early
days.

I have not been at the company for 3+ years so want to make crystal clear I
don’t know “intimately” what’s going on at the organization. With that said, I
still know enough about the business to say the following.

Been reading about developers, business owners, etc worrying about your
application stability or fearing the need to migrate to another
infrastructure, all warrented feelings. I want to share some thoughts as an
(old)insider.

DIGITALOCEAN IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE. You don’t make $200M+ in ARR and all of a
sudden shutdown. Especially as a company who has always prioritized the BEST
product experience. Prioritized the BEST customer experience. If you’ve been a
customer of DO, you know they go above and beyond you. DigitalOcean’s offering
is still by far the most developer-friendly and delightful infrastructure
experience on the market.

One of my biggest frustrations when I worked there was the lack of advanced
features offered for scaling applications, I'm shockingly surprised that in
the past few years they quickly launched Kubernetes, Database as a service,
and Object Storage, granted all table stake stuff that AWS already has, but
nevertheless has made DigitalOcean a very mature product. I'm low-key annoyed
they didn't launch this when customers were yelling at me as the customer
success point person, begging for all these features...anyways good for those
that are customers today :)

As the co-founder mentioned above, the business has gone through several CEO
changes with the purpose of preparing for an even grander expansion. So far
hasn't worked as planned. When leadership changes, rockiness always occurs,
and it’s up to the next CEO to steer the ship. I don't know the new CEO and
have no clue if he's any good, but I wish him good luck. Layoffs happen when
businesses are tanking, but they also happen when a business is preparing for
another launch at greatness. I'm truly empathetic to those that were laid off
today, as a fellow DO-Shark that can't feel good. Even though you are likely
folks I've never met, my thought are with you.

If you are a developer, DigitalOcean will always be a place for you to
incubate, innovate, and grow your business. I'm confident of that.

------
webscientist
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...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/from-15-000-database-connections-
to-under-100-digitaloceans-tale-of-tech-debt/)

~~~
sunny--tech
Author here.

I think you might be referring to this:

[https://dev.to/digitalocean/from-15-000-database-
connections...](https://dev.to/digitalocean/from-15-000-database-connections-
to-under-100-digitalocean-s-tale-of-tech-debt-43bj)

Same post, just on a different platform.

For context, I was responding to someone who said the article read like an
advertisement for DO. To clarify, this post has nothing to do with the layoffs
and was not coordinated for it. I had no prior knowledge of the org
restructuring.

I’ve been working on that article on-and-off for over a year. The timing of
its publishing and the layoffs are coincidental and unfortunate.

------
WarOnPrivacy
DigitalOcean hater here.

I won't counter any of the praise I'm reading; if anything this will probably
validate it.

I'm on the other end of the DO equation.

My small mail server is relentlessly targeted for spam from DigitalOcean IPs -
and has been for years.

In fact there are 4 networks I block (by ASN) - DO, OVH, AWS (new!) and Psychz
Networks. (note: No mail from outside N.Am/EU allowed)

Forget to stop my mail server when dropping the firewall for 20 seconds? Get a
½ dozen spams from DigitalOcean IPs.

I actually like that there are hosts for dodgy services. I also get that
conscientious hosts get bad customers and it takes time to overcome their bad
behavior.

However from the time I 1st heard of DO until now, it's an unbroken timeline
of DO being a toxic source. (note: The difficulty of reporting spammy IPs in
bulk - using firewall not mail server logs - is another post)

So like a lot of orgs, DigitalOcean treats people on the inside really well.
But for those of us on the receiving end of unwanted attention from DO
networks, it's a rough ride.

------
marto1
Sad to see. They've been nothing but great with me as a customer and should
serve as an example of how to do good business(yes, I know, I know..scandal
this, scandal that).

Hope the laid off find something else and maybe better soon.

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shakezula
Is it just me or are we starting to see the first signs of mass lay-offs in
tech? Mozilla, now DigitalOcean, I feel like we're starting to see the first
bleeding cuts of the recession take hold.

And I just got my life together, too.

~~~
roguecoder
It is January: layoffs often cluster during January. I'm not yet seeing a
flood of candidates for our open roles, so I'm not worried.

------
pier25
Everyone knows DO for their VPS but their object storage prices are some of
the lowest.

$0.02 per GB stored

$0.01 per GB transferred.

That includes CDN too.

I haven't found a better deal anywhere. Even Blackblaze doesn't offer CDN
(AFAIK).

~~~
techsin101
Could flare cdn vs digital ocean?

~~~
pier25
How much does Cloudflare CDN cost?

------
greyhair
From the tail end of the article:

It’s been an active week for layoffs among tech startups. Mozilla laid off 70
employees this week;

What is the cutoff age for an organization to be a "startup"?

~~~
imsofuture
It just means tech company these days.

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vira28
totally irrelevant, but wanted to throw here.

Their documentation and simple blogs are very very useful.

------
awinter-py
IMO part of the value of DO is to have a cloud host that isn't running a
competing business.

netflix has done fine on AWS but that still feels iffy to me.

~~~
zomglings
Anti-trust fear offers some protection to companies like Netflix.

I wonder if health insurance companies have the same protection given Amazon's
moves into the space. [0]

[0] [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-jpmorgan-roll-new-
healt...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-jpmorgan-roll-new-health-
insurance-plans-part-haven-joint-venture/)

------
zupreme
I, spread across multiple ventures, spend a significant (to us) sum with
DigitalOcean.

I was a bit panicked by the story and, I imagine like many, Was already
thinking up migration strategies to communicate to the team in the morning.

The response given by the cofounder allows me to rest this weekend, and keeps
me from harassing engineering staff while off.

Thanks.

------
cloudc0de
SpinUp also offers $5/mo VMs, mine have been extremely stable so far. They
even have a $50 credit for new users
[https://spinup.com/pricing/](https://spinup.com/pricing/)

------
bhouston
I think DO is wanting to go public at some point and needs to get their
margins up.

------
esaym
Weird, when I go to the link, the page immediately redirects to
[https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1....](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1.....).

Even if I try to just go to techcrunch.com/, same thing. I only notice this
because *advertising.com is in my host file on my router so instead of
redirecting, I just get a "server not found" error page in firefox.

If I open a private tab, techcrunch.com loads fine. Looking at the network tab
in the dev console when trying to load techcrunch.com seems to show that no
redirect is made, just that techcrunch.com automatically becomes
guce.advertising.com... Have I been pawnd?

~~~
geocrasher
Sounds like adware. Check your browser extensions.

~~~
esaym
I don't see anything. I'm running on debian and never used any extensions.

------
PeterZaitsev
Interesting story of Hyper-funded DigitalOcean vs Bootstrapped Linode

~~~
gramakri
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?

~~~
jgalentine007
Profit margins back in the day were a lot better than they are now. I started
a web hosting company back in 99' as a high school senior with a couple
hundred dollars, bootstrapped it to half a million in a couple years, and then
over a million by year 10 (and sold it!) At that point margins had gotten
skimpy and AWS with all their backing was eating up the market.

------
nawaaz
I am planning to apply for an open position at DO. Does anyone thinks it's the
right time to switch there?

------
wnevets
I wonder if its because I just destroyed that $5 droplet I had running

------
superbrane
If this cutoffs are made for the sake of increasing profitability of an
already profitable company, they are a bad sign in terms of management style
and quality - it will affect morale, creativity and enthusiasm of remaining
employees.

------
rasengan0
With all this praise, time for me to check out DO!

------
LeonB
If EIG buy them I’m out.

------
maxlecactus
Why does DitialOcean not offer GPU instances? It would be a great addition!

