
TechStars Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS - muellerwolfram
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/techstars-graduate-digitalocean-switches-to-ssd-for-its-5-per-month-vps-to-take-on-linode-and-rackspace/
======
sirn
I was wondering about bandwidth limit of their VPS, and found this in their
pricing page:

> We don’t charge for bandwidth. You’ll save a ton of money with our network
> and it's easy to get started. No need to figure out how much bandwidth
> you’re going to use, whether that traffic is in or out. Set your site up and
> pay no extra if it takes off.

Whenever I see statement like this I'm not sure whether I should trust it;
what if I use 1 TB/month, would I get kicked out for "using too much
bandwidth"? What's your real soft cap?

~~~
raiyu
We are figuring out what the soft cap will be based on our customers usage and
averaging that out, right now we are considering something in the 2TB-5TB
range.

Honestly we just didn't prioritize traffic accounting as other features were a
priority =]

~~~
sirn
Thanks, that's nice to know. I wish there would be some mention of soft cap
somewhere in the website, though.

~~~
raiyu
We're big on listening to customer feedback so we're going to address that
issue sooner rather than later. =]

When bandwidth pricing is introduced it will be in line with the pricing that
we have for SSD/512MB servers so it will still be one of the lowest in the
industry, that much is guaranteed.

~~~
e1ven
Thanks! Seeing "unlimited" bandwidth is actually a deal breaker for me and may
other people.

Even if you mean it in all sincerity, when I see that, what I assume is that
there's a secret hidden limit, and I can't know what it is. So that means the
site is instantly useless, no matter how good of a deal it might have
otherwise been!

An thought-experiment example I've given otherplaces - Let's say I start a
site called DevUrandom.org - It has an API which pushes out network-limited
random bits.

I fire up computers around the world, and have them filling up their crypto
systems using DevUrandom.org, at 100Mbit/sec.

Is that OK? What if I love the service so much, I spin up 100 such boxes? etc,
etc.

It's not that your service doesn't sound awesome, it's just that if I'm going
to rely on it, I don't want it pulled away for arbitrary reasons, because I
hit a double-secret limit. I'd rather know what's OK and what's not OK going
in.

Further, it aligns our interests- If I'm paying you, for the things that cost
you money, I have an incentive to minimize them! If you have to pay for it,
and I don't, I'll do whatever's easiest for me, and not bother spending
time/money to reduce bandwidth.

(A classic example of this is seen in with Landlords/Tenants - Tenants pay for
Electricity, but Landlords generally buy appliances. This means that Landlords
have little incentive to buy energy efficient appliances.. They won't be
paying for the energy anyway)

------
bitcartel
Many VPS providers have already switched to SSD and only charge a few bucks
per month.

Check out providers and special offers at...

LowEndBox <http://www.lowendbox.com/> with forums here
<http://www.lowendtalk.com/>

CheapVPSDeals <http://cheapvpsdeals.net/>

------
jws
Tempting, but no IPv6. That's a deal breaker for infrastructure. I don't want
to have to revisit machines later.

I'm also a little nervous about the unlimited bandwidth. That seems like it
will attract bulk data movers that could affect my traffic. There is no
mention of fairness, link utilization, or any kind of traffic allocation
policy. I could benchmark it today, but that doesn't help me tomorrow.

Still, interesting enough to add to the list of options with the next project.

~~~
raiyu
IPv6 is slated for sometime later in 2013, we've had a lot of customers
request it and probably closer to Spring / Summer we will be testing it.

As for unlimited bandwidth that is something we offered because we didn't have
time to write bandwidth accounting and wanted to focus development on the core
service more, we figured that was more important for us in the short run.

We will be switching to paid bandwidth in the future and offering bundled
packages with each server and then a simple flat per GB price after that.

------
jedicoffee
I tried this service, support was a 5+ hour response time commonly. Latency
was terrible and they had DNS issues they refused to acknowledge, I was even
issued a 5$ credit, however they still didn't acknowledge their issues. I was
also billed metered when I should have been a monthly customer, this being
said I will never use any of their services or parent companies services in
the future.

~~~
raiyu
Sorry to hear about your experience as a growing start-up we definitely run
into issues with growth.

We do not offer monthly plans, everything is on a per-usage basis except we
default to a monthly price to keep billing simpler for our users, so that was
just a misunderstanding on billing.

As for DNS we offered it as a new service in labs, because we were testing it
with our customers and improving it based on their feedback. And Im sure if
you opened up tickets regarding it, it helped us track down bugs.

------
kawsper
Too few cores for my liking. Linode was a lot faster than DigitalOcean when
running my Rails application.

I think it all came down to the numbers of cores where Linode have four, where
I think I only had access to one on DigitalOcean.

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precisionpete
What underlying hypervisor/server technology is this service using? Looks
really interesting... I'm using Rackspace Cloud Servers now. It's been Great!
But gets expensive fast if you have to scale...

~~~
mitchwainer
We use KVM. Here is a $20 credit to try us out! =]

Promo Code: SSDPOWER20

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japhyr
I signed up for a free trial this morning when I had a few minutes, but won't
be able to do anything with it for the next few days. I am starting to get
messages that my account will self-destruct if I don't give it my credit card
information in the next two hours.

I really don't like "free trials" that require you to have a cc on file, with
the promise of not charging it. Believe me, if I decide to build anything
meaningful on this platform, I will transition to a paid account.

Is the free trial really only 3 hours if I don't give you my cc information?

------
driverdan
Any plans for adding SAN / additional storage space? It'd be nice to have 20GB
SSD + 1TB non-SSD.

~~~
zagi
It is one of our most up-voted features and we will begin building out storage
solutions this month now that our SSD/RAM upgrades are finished.

We are still deciding whether to roll out first some sort of block/tiered NFS
storage that can be mounted or something API driven like S3, so feedback is
welcome.

~~~
ssmoot
Unless it's HA-NFS, which is very difficult, I'd say S3-like.

I'm about to sign up for the 2GB box since my 512MB VPS at Linode isn't enough
memory to really make Play framework fly and upgrading gets very expensive
fast.

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corford
Despite being a long time (and happy!) Linode user, the prices and SSD are
just too interesting to pass over.

I'm running a small Zarafa based mail server on a 2GB plan with Linode and it
could do with more RAM. Perfect opportunity to try out a 4GB "droplet" :)

~~~
corford
As a quick follow up in case anyone's interested (having just bought and spun
up a 4GB instance), the raw vm performance is fantastic but the control panel
functionality is fairly basic in comparison to Linode.

AFAICT, you can't:

\- Choose different kernel images

\- Resize or alter the disk and swap partitions

\- Setup a private network interface

\- Specify what action to take if the vm hangs (watchdog)

\- Run IPv6

\- See machine mem, cpu and bandwidth usage from within the web panel

\- Setup IP white lists and security email alerts

\- See the progress of queued jobs (e.g. taking a vm snapshot)

So, it's fast but pretty basic. For the price I think it's a great deal and
I'm sure some (or all) of the missing features above will be added over time
as the service matures.

Edit: I've just discovered you do get a progress bar when taking a snapshot
but only if you access the snapshot feature from within the server panel
(rather than doing it via the "Images" link on the main left hand menu). They
also mention the vm gets powered off while the snapshot is taken but mine
stayed up...

~~~
_rs
According to the FAQ there is a private network though I didn't see a way to
enable it: <https://www.digitalocean.com/faq>

------
gilli
Their benchmarks don't seem all that great considering that they are supposed
to have SSD's

<http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean#view-benchmarks>

~~~
raiyu
We offer a free 3 hour trial and if you register with a credit card or a
PayPal payment you get an extra $1.25 credit which is the equivalent of
running a 512MB virtual server for free for close to week so you can test
things yourself in production.

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ck2
Here's the funny thing about SSD in RAID:

If they are the same model and age, they tend to fail at the same time.

You get more than a single drive failing at the same time = data loss.

(the 100 pushups is darn impressive though)

~~~
raiyu
Also true of regular harddrives, just the nature of the game when technically
all of the harddrives are under the same load due to RAID and even with
different manufacturing times the loads are the same so it's hard to estimate
how far apart the batches should be in order to really minimize the incidence
of such events.

We do provide snapshots and backups and always recommend that customers backup
their servers and take care of ensuring that they have access to their
important content in case of any failure.

But maybe we can do the impossible if we can do 100 pushups ;)

~~~
ck2
The MTBF for SSD in a server environment is two to three years maximum though.

(just ask someone on OVH)

~~~
zagi
We've seen a high failure rate on SSD compared to SAS & SATA drives. All of
our servers are in a RAID environment, so a single failure does not take the
system offline. Additionally our backups and snapshots provide another level
of redundancy against disk failure. So far no data loss.

------
ukd1
Although a bunch of people have been having issues judging by the comments, my
experience just now was impressively easy and makes me want to benchmark/test
it further.

Great job guys.

~~~
raiyu
Thanks!

Everyone has growing pains we are no exception, and today every little hiccup
is public, but it's good because it makes the service overall more resilient
so we welcome all feedback positive and negative because it ultimately leads
to a better service for our customers.

------
joe_bleau
What's the virtualization technology (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, etc.)? Are the boxes
running ECC RAM? Can we install and run our own kernel?

~~~
mitchwainer
We use KVM and ECC RAM. And yes, you can install and run your own kernel. =]

~~~
specto
Are the servers really in NYC or are they in NJ like most providers who claim
to be in NYC?

~~~
mitchwainer
They are in North Bergen, NJ at Equinix.

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pitzips
I get a 404 everytime I try to update my hostname entries. "Oh no! It seems
the page you were looking for has been eaten by Sammy."

~~~
beigeotter
We are working on resolving this issue. I apologize for the inconvenience.

EDIT: we have resolved this problem. You can now add your hostname

~~~
jedicoffee
OP See my post this seems to be a frequent issue.

------
TheTaytay
This is what I see at www.digitalocean.com:

The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable. Please try again
later.

Then I got a redirect loop. :(

~~~
raiyu
We have a 45-90 second delay on our front-end firewall, we are also doing a
few code deploys right now so it takes a little while to reset.

Our focus is always on ensuring that virtual servers that customers run are
unaffected, but its great to get a nice traffic spike to the front-end to also
see real world usage and how we should be updating things for the future.

~~~
TheTaytay
Cool, was hoping I just caught you at an inopportune second. :)

------
nachteilig
Great pricing, but it doesn't give me a lot of confidence in their service
when it can't survive being linked from TC.

~~~
mitchwainer
We are back online. We are spinning up thousands of servers right now. Would
love for you to give us a shot. Here is a $20 credit coupon - "SSDBEAR20" Let
me know what you think.

~~~
japhyr
Do we have to enter a credit card to use this code? I'd love to give it a
longer trial, but don't want to store my credit card while I'm trying it out.

~~~
japhyr
Answered my own question. When I tried to enter the code without giving a
credit card, the billing form was rejected for not having cc info. But a few
minutes later I got an email saying I have the $20 on my account.

Thanks! I will enjoy trying out the service, and I will sign a couple students
up this afternoon.

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bilalq
Chrome seems to be detecting TechCrunch as malware right now. Anyone else
getting this problem?

~~~
GavinAnderegg
I just saw this as well.

~~~
mitchwainer
I believe it was an advertiser that did it.

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robflynn
Do you currently only have the New York region or are there other regions
available as well ?

~~~
mitchwainer
We have a datacenter in Amsterdam as well.

------
mrbobke
Congrats guys. If I ever need to spin up a server, I'll definitely be sailing
your ocean.

~~~
mitchwainer
Thanks Mrbobke! =]

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jyothepro
Any discounts if I buy for an entire year or two?

~~~
raiyu
We dont currently offer any long-term discounts because a customers usage is
variable based on how many servers they spin up/destroy.

