
DigitalOcean opens a Singapore Datacenter - beigeotter
https://digitalocean.com/blog_posts/we-re-excited-to-announce-our-singapore-datacenter-sgp1
======
yapcguy
Ok, this is nonsense!

DigitalOcean did not "open" a data center in Singapore. All they have done is
rented some racks / colo space from Equinix in an existing facility.

[http://www.equinix.com/locations/singapore-
colocation/singap...](http://www.equinix.com/locations/singapore-
colocation/singapore-data-center)

They're just another customer - to spin and imply they have built or opened a
brand new data center is ridiculous.

 _" Our decision to open a new datacenter"_ is really "We've located servers
in Singapore". What's wrong with telling the truth?

Just more evidence that DigitalOcean is all PR and hot air after their pot-
shots at Linode and brushing off security issues as "features".

~~~
deeths
They haven't said anything untrue. They're open about the fact they're working
with a colo provider and using a common definition for "datacenter"
appropriately.

While "datacenter" can refer to the physical building, it's also commonly used
to refer to a set of server/storage/network resources physically cordoned off
for your use in a colo.

Using this definition isn't just common with hundreds of other hosters, its
well standardized in IT circles, and used as the official definition of the
word "datacenter" by numerous industry groups, regulators, analysts, and the
US Federal government.

For instance: [http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/data-
cente...](http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/data-center)
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/ego...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/egov_docs/cio_memo_fdcci_deliverables_van_roekel_3-19-12.pdf)

The whitehouse.gov pdf above says: "under the FDCCI, a data center is now
defined as a closet, room, floor, or building for the storage, management, and
dissemination of data and information. Such a repository houses computer
systems and associated components...<snip>... housed in leased (including by
cloud providers), owned, collocated, or stand-alone facilities."

~~~
yapcguy
I'll respectfully disagree. They are implying creation and ownership of an
entire facility. They want to market themselves as being bigger and stronger
than they actually are.

I guess hustling and bending the truth is rule 101 in marketing for start-ups
these days, but it doesn't have to be like that.

When Blue Bottle open a new coffee shop, that's what they call it, an opening.
If other coffee shops stock their coffee, Blue Bottle don't claim to have
opened a new location, they simply say their coffee is available or served
there.

~~~
deeths
Their announcement uses the phrase "Working with Equinix to ensure the highest
quality facility". Since Equinix is a colo provider, that implies they're
running in a colo.

If you read their FAQ
([https://www.digitalocean.com/faq](https://www.digitalocean.com/faq)),
they're pretty clear that their other datacenters are in 3rd party colos: "We
have datacenters located in the NYC area (located in the Equinix and Telx
datacenters), San Francisco (Telx), and in Amsterdam (TelecityGroup)."

------
mattezell
Happy to hear about the new opening, DO. Happy customer here - thanks for
providing what has proven to be solid service and support for me (far better
than my previous 'budget provider').

I am seeing a lot of complaints about DO that has nothing to do with this
announcement... Traceroutes and ping times from the region - legit. Debate on
the claim of 'opening a data center' (vs renting rack space) - legit (at least
on topic). Complaining about lack of DO features - off topic and noise...

Let's be honest about what DigitalOcean is (and they may not like my
categorization - I don't know, I'm just a customer) - they are a low price /
budget hosting provider... I am not saying that people's complaints about lack
of features or problems aren't legitimate complaints, but that they don't
particularly belong here or add value to this discussion. DO has been on here
a lot - whining about wants and complaints on every post is lame...

You want to voice your complaints? Write a post about why DO doesn't live up
to your dream of all that a $5/mo VPS solution should live up to on your
little blog and see if it makes it to the front page - then you can rightfully
whine about lack of IPv6 all you want and know that you're not just thread
dumping on a young small company's enthusiastic announcement about expanding
their services. Or... Here's a thought for all of you super awesome critics
who clearly know what's up way more than DO does - go make something superior
and sell it for $4.50/mo!!!

~~~
jdc0589
Perfect example from another comment: "I'm worried about DigitalOcean. I think
their priority should be to try to approach feature parity with Amazon or
Rackspace."

Maintaining/achieving solid quality and reliability with their current, or a
slightly extended feature set, while maintaining their awesome price point is
FAR more important than feature parity with the biggest VPS hosts in the
world. We don't need another hosting provider that has every feature ever at a
premium price. We need a provider with a smaller feature set that is more
affordable.

~~~
neom
+1

That doesn't mean no new features, but we are certainly not rushing products
out the door, market pressure or not. We know what we're doing. :)

------
latch
Something seems off with the routing. I'm on one of the big 3 internet
providers in Singapore, and I'm getting a 300-400ms latency to their ping
server (speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com) and to a droplet which I just
started.

    
    
        DO <-> SL ~2ms
        DO <-> AWS ~2ms
        Me <-> SL ~15ms
        Me <-> AWS ~15ms
        Me <-> DO   350ms

~~~
nwh
Not the best from Australia yet either.

    
    
        --- speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        49 packets transmitted, 45 packets received, 8.2% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 262.448/360.721/530.517/66.088 ms

~~~
latch
Despite what DO said in their announcement, my experience says that Australian
users are better served by servers in California than Singapore.

~~~
nwh
They're all terrible, but SFO does look better for me than the rest.

    
    
        --- speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 281.718/334.077/458.775/43.216 ms
    
        --- speedtest-ams2.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 368.574/423.556/581.576/46.758 ms
    
        --- speedtest-nyc2.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 47 packets received, 6.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 283.225/338.437/428.314/31.986 ms
    
        --- speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 284.853/339.193/424.864/29.139 ms
    
        --- speedtest-ams1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 47 packets received, 6.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 352.165/453.513/584.099/52.971 ms
    
        --- speedtest-sfo1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
        50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 205.293/324.091/445.077/54.935 ms

------
mkhattab
I'm worried about DigitalOcean. I think their priority should be to try to
approach feature parity with Amazon or Rackspace. As of now, there are many
features that are missing, such as private networking (only available in
NYC2), CDN, elastic IP, load balancing, etc.

How about the ability to support attaching metadata to any instance?[0] How
difficult is this to implement? More importantly, how would a devops person
manage many instances without this feature? Isn't ex-EC2/Rackspace/<others>
the target market for DigitalOcean?

\--- [0]:
[http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3682231-add-
tags-to-instances)

~~~
stephen_g
Not to mention IPv6. I like DigitalOcean but am starting to think of
completely ditching them not just because they don't have it (delays are
understandable), but because the last word from them (around August or
September last year) was that they'd have a public beta in October, and then
gone completely silent.

No public beta happened, and now they won't respond to any customer queries
about it. I'm fine with there being delays, but very not fine about the silent
treatment (or vague answers like 'it's in development' \- actually give some
detail of what's been going on because it's been 'in development' for
something like three years now).

~~~
mkhattab
I guess the reason is because their focus is primarily on expansion. They're
trying to put on their big boy pants too soon.

~~~
hyperplane
Or they're simply under investor pressure to put on those big boy pants over
achieving feature parity.

~~~
Gigablah
Or they're simply, you know, responding to demand.

~~~
raiyu
You hit the nail on the head. We provided, and more specifically, I, directly
did, estimates on when we launch certain features.

Unfortunately those deadlines have come and gone. That was because those
estimates were rooted in timeframes around how we were able to write code in
2012 when we didn't hit the large growth spurt we did in 2013.

As a result the majority of 2013 was about meeting customer demand. Luckily
we've finished out the year very well in scaling the various teams within the
company and adding in the necessary layers of management so that we finally
feel that we are getting back on track with engineering again.

With the launch of Singapore there are actually alot of updates under the hood
that customers don't see but the hypverisors in Singapore are running on a
completely new version of our cloud backend.

As we close out February we are reviewing our product roadmap and will start
providing feedback again on estimates and hopefully be once again much more
accurate in those estimates.

One of the other items we've considered is putting together a blog post about
our 2013 in review and specifically focusing on what happened to our product
roadmap and what delays we hit and why, and how we are looking to get past
those challenges in 2014.

Thanks!

------
IgorPartola
And still no IPv6 support :(. When will they make it a priority?

~~~
kordless
First thing I said when I came in - glad to see others say the same!

I just figured out I can run IPV6 hosts at home on Comcast and ping them from
an IPV6 ping gateway page. I'm still scratching my head on how that works and
whether or not my router allows all IPV6 packets inbound to all hosts. Tried
to test on AWS, but that's not working. Went to my DO account, and still no
support.

Rackspace supports IPV6, but I think something wonky happened to my account
when I was testing the developer credits for them. I need to get it fixed.

Anyone have IPV6 at home and want to help me test it?

~~~
IgorPartola
Depending on what your router is running (hopefully OpenWRT), ping6/ICMPv6
should be allowed to any host by default. Check out your firewall rules and
see what it says there. ICMPv6 is an important part of IPv6, and in general
not being able to ping something isn't really a security gain, so much as a
usability loss.

On my OpenWRT setup, the default is to rate limit ICMPv6 to 1000
requests/second and to limit the response types.

~~~
kordless
I'm able to SSH into my internal servers. Configuring OpenStack now to
provision the addresses for instances as well.

I have an Asus RT-AC66U. Tried to flash with OpenWRT and a few others and
failed a few months ago. It would appear it DOES NOT have a firewall enabled,
so I'm wide open, so to speak.

~~~
IgorPartola
Ooh, that's not good. I would suggest you put up a firewall directly on as
many devices as you can. Then, try to get a router upgrade, or a router that
can handle an IPv6 firewall. I think I know the router you have and I believe
TomatoUSB can run on it, which has ip6tables installed.

~~~
kordless
I know it seems like it's not good, but I was thinking about it and even with
Comcast's /64 aggregate, I have a billion BILLION addresses available inside
my network. If you could scan at a billion addresses a second, it would take
30 years to scan all of Comcast's IPV6 addresses. That's crazy.

~~~
IgorPartola
Well, not really. The first 64 bits are not all possible. They are subdivided,
since some addresses are link-local, some are multicast, etc. Then, Comcast
only has a certain allocation of that. On top of that, could one find a patter
in how they allocate their addresses?

The second 64 bits are also not quite random. Most of your devices will
autoconfigure using radvd. This means that the second 64 bits depend on their
MAC address. Now, if I knew of an exploit to, say, a printer or a NAS device,
I would know the MAC address range. My guess is that I could probably reduce
the 128 bit address space to something like 100 or even 90 bits.

Second, and this makes it all the above a moot point, don't your devices
connect to the internet? Any time they connect to a site, that site knows the
IP address and that data may be used either explicitly or leaked and used by
someone else. Everyone between you and the site also knows the address.

Lastly, if you ever set up a DNS record for any of these addresses, they are
then visible to others even with some scanning if you don't ever publish the
actual names.

Long story short, there is hoping you don't get hacked and there is knowing
you have a firewall that only allows what you want in.

------
m4r71n
How does DigitalOcean compare to RamNode? I've been using a small VPS at
RamNode and it's been great. It offers pretty much the same features (SSD, 1
CPU, 1 Gbps connection) as DigitalOcean (plus RamNode offers 16 IPv6
addresses), yet it's half the price. The only downside to RamNode is the 500
GB of bandwidth compared to 1 TB at DigitalOcean. Maybe I'm missing something,
but why would one use DigitalOcean over RamNode for VPS hosting?

~~~
cmircea
500GB bandwidth you say? That is the plan with only 128MB of memory; you can't
run many things with so little memory. The 512MB plan at RamNode is $7.5, 50%
more.

~~~
exhilaration
Is that factoring in the coupons they keep putting out there? I paid $100.44
for a year after their 38% coupon (38RLY) and signed up for 1024 MB RAM plan,
150 GB disk, 2 IPv4 addresses, 3000 GB bandwidth. It's great.

~~~
cmircea
If you're looking for a bargain, I found this:

    
    
        2GB RAM, 50GB disk, 2TB bw, 2 IPv4, 100Mbps
        STEALOFADEAL (coupon) - 12 months, $40
        Chicago, IL - https://billing.chicagovps.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=160
        Buffalo, NY - https://billing.chicagovps.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=161
        Los Angeles, CA - https://billing.chicagovps.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=162
        Atlanta, GA - https://billing.chicagovps.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=163a=add&pid=163

~~~
Matsta
ChicagoVPS are terrible. If you Google ChicagoVPS the suggest searches are
"ChicagoVPS down" and "ChicagoVPS hacked".

There's 10 million threads on Lowendtalk bitching about ChicagoVPS. Here's one
from last year. [http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/7668/chicagovps-has-lost-
th...](http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/7668/chicagovps-has-lost-their-mind-s)

~~~
cmircea
You get what you pay for.

------
aguki
Why are those complaining about routing issues posting ping outputs instead of
traceroutes?

~~~
jlgaddis
It doesn't matter. Even if they posted traceroutes, they'd only be from one
direction which is near useless anyways.

------
hendry
I started a SG droplet about 5 hours ago. It's still down. They're suffering
some outage and it's a shame it isn't mentioned on their status page. #fail

[https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/433451127657357312](https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/433451127657357312)

I'll stick with GPLhost for now
[http://webconverger.org/servers/](http://webconverger.org/servers/)

------
d0
They need to keep on top of existing demand as well and start running over-
capacity. Not joking but it's pretty long wait to get an instance up in a
preferred DC sometimes which is putting a lot of us off the platform.

~~~
AJ007
I am going to keep machines at Digital Ocean, but they have had the most
failures/downtime I have seen from any host that I've used in nearly a decade,
including ec2, rackspace, and gogrid (if there is anyone left using gogrid.)

One problem we've run in to is an instance fails, but it can't be brought back
up because the backup image is only located in the datacenter that is already
at capacity.

~~~
d0
A million upvotes if I could.

I didn't actually consider that last point. That has effectively killed DO for
me instantly from a risk point of view and I'm going to immediately migrate my
two machines off it. Literally it's 22:50 here tonight and I don't think I'll
sleep until it's done.

Have some company credit left over with Azure so will throw it on there on
Ubuntu for now.

------
gabemart
It used to be that it was possible to take a snapshot of a DO droplet without
shutting down the droplet, provided the droplet had 1GB of ram or higher.

Does anyone know if this is still the case?

~~~
InAnEmergency
I don't know if that was ever the case, but at this point you do have to power
off the droplet to make a snapshot:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/digitalocean-
backups-and-snapshots-explained)

~~~
Rapidwire
You can take a "backup" without powering down, but not a "snapshot".

------
j45
I hope a Canadian Datacenter (preferably westcoast) is in the cards soon!

~~~
Rapidwire
Make a uservoice post about it if there isn't one.

------
kordless
I wish they would add IPV6 support.

