
$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups - lacorp
http://blog.ycombinator.com/$250k-of-digitalocean-credits-for-yc-startups
======
tombrossman
144 comments as I type this and I can't believe no one has mentioned OVH yet.
I'm a happy customer of DigitalOcean, AWS, and OVH and my default choice for a
while now has been OVH. DigitalOcean beats everyone in ease of use and UX, and
AWS obviously has huge potential for scaling, but OVH consistently beats
DigitalOcean in VPS performance and they include DDOS protection as standard.

Test for yourself, fire up similarly sized VPSs at both DigitalOcean and OVH
and benchmark them running identical tests. The DigitalOcean VPSs are pretty
fast but the OVH ones consistently perform better for both CPU and disk speed.

OVH supports startups just like the rest of the companies mentioned elsewhere
in the thread too - see
[https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/](https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/) for info. I have no
affiliation with any of these companies except as a customer.

~~~
tajen
OVH is a French group, submitted to the new Jan 2015 law about spying. Read
this for more information: [https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-
surveillan...](https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillance-
law)

~~~
kuschku
So, they have the same situation as DO, practically (where we can be sure that
the NSA has some backdoor in the systems).

~~~
rtpg
No, it's worse than that. The French spying apparatus has way less legal
boundaries because the government basically doesn't want to acknowledge the
spying even happens.

At least you can argue in an American court that you have standing if you have
proof the NSA is spying on you

~~~
davidandgoliath
... and? "Way less legal boundaries" — the NSA doesn't even have a published
budget. If you're on the internet, you're in their database(s) and so is your
data. If you're interesting to them, your sysadmins are already exploited.

Court? Legal avenues? Legal _boundaries?!_ Surely you jest.

~~~
rtpg
and do you think the DGSE is some sort of transparent body?

They're obviously both groups you don't want to have as buddies, but the NSA
has lost court battles before, and ends up complying with the rulings most of
the time.

The French surveillance services openly gloat about working in a "judicial
vacuum": basically all the rules of its operations are decided by the Prime
Minister and their pals, and basically have no legislative boundaries.

------
andrewstuart
Aren't there a bunch of offers of free cloud hosting for Startups? We should
list them here.

And you don't need to be a YC company......

Microsoft Azure gives hosting to startups under their Bizspark program - get
over your prejudice - it's a great way to run Linux machines.

Softlayer and Rackspace I think also have programs for startups.

Any other companies offer free hosting to startups?

~~~
curun1r
Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or
receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders
trying to bootstrap a company without external funding are SOL.

It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in
businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups
who try to manage costs to get to profitability more quickly.

~~~
iolothebard
BizSpark requires a 5 minute write up. It's comically easy to get accepted as
an individual if you can string together a few sentences.

Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me.
Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available
now is incredible IMO.</old man>

~~~
geoka9
"Deploy a Linux VM on Azure. Azure supports a wide range of Linux
distributions including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Chef and Puppet."

Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS
stacks?

~~~
ewindisch
My experience has been positive.

Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best
Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by
docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead
of the curve.

As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual,
such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server
they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name,
then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the
name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.

~~~
devsquid
GCN and AWS both have very easy drop in Docker support. I'm not sure how it
could get any easier.

~~~
ewindisch
Yes, they do, but Azure beat them to offer first-class support and did so with
their own Docker-API compatible endpoint. This was back around the first
Dockercon in 2014. Rackspace had a similar integration at the time, but I was
definitely more impressed by what Azure was doing.

------
bmh_ca
As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups
with our fees to DO.

Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers
have done.

Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the
service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more
ecumenical.

The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have
been similarly slighted.

~~~
andrewsomething
We're always looking for ways to help startups get up and running on our
platform. If you're not a YC company, reach out to our customer success team.
They can help you get started. If you're already a DO user, they can help you
scale up.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/sales/](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/sales/)

~~~
hoodoof
So just make the offer to all startups.

If your company employs less than three people then $X amount of service
provided per month.

~~~
volaski
In some way these guys are "investing" in these YC companies' future, hoping
that when they grow they will stick with DO. YC has good track record so it's
relatively a good bet, whereas if they did it with any rando startup, they'll
probably lose tons of money (statistically 99% of the startups die). Remember
this is a company not a charity.

------
caleblloyd
Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K
expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud
provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit,
they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a
paying customer after the first year.

It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money in
the long run by developing efficient applications that likely won't come close
to a $100k credit in the first year. This will also likely result in a much
more scalable app and much less technical debt.

~~~
andrewsomething
Yes. Similar to programs offered by other providers, this credit does expire
after one year.

~~~
tim333
Apparently Bizsparks lasts three years.

------
tshtf
Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any
serious project.

 _No custom kernel support_

1\. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively.

2\. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated.

3\. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities.

4\. This has been a known issue since 2013.

5\. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-
i-b...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-boot-my-
compiled-kernel-image-on-gentoo)

 _Private networking is a joke_

1\. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same
datacenter.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
isol...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isolate-
servers-within-a-private-network-using-iptables)

 _IPv6 support_

1\. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers.

2\. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards.

~~~
jorgecurio
Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious
projects. I don't see why this is a joke.

~~~
viraptor
It's less about customised kernel and more about an up-to-date one. You may
want to patch at your own schedule (faster, or slower than DO). Any serious
project will take updates (especially security updates) seriously.

------
pcote
>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies.

I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital
Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes,
Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper
growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses.

That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that
matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I
had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the
SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common
cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher
than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.

~~~
zanewill9
This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At
that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few
startups that were caught off-guard.

AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from
Digital Ocean and Linode.

------
Gaessaki
This is nice and long due regardless of DigitalOcean's actual merits. AWS,
Google (100k), IBM (120k) and Microsoft (500k) all offer credits to YC
companies. More options will compel cloud providers to provide better service
offerings to startups.

I wonder to what extent YC companies default to AWS though. Based on what I've
heard from acquaintances at Microsoft, I'm not sure they're getting the
traction they'd like.

------
arrty88
I'm sure this has been said already, but this is a pretty big slap in the face
to startups not in a fancy incubator program, which probably already have
everything else going for them. It's like giving a big check to someone who
already won a full ride to a top university, no?

~~~
andreamazz
I share your feeling. We are running our cloud platform on AWS, and it's hard
to offer competitive prices when you are not founded and the AWS bills kick
your ass. We are in an university incubator that gives us the office space (we
pay a 'friendly' rent) and that's it. I realize it's a petty feeling, but...

------
goeric
I think it's great that DO is offering this, but it's a little shocking they
don't offer this to fellow Techstars alum. We only get $10K in credits, which
is a stark contrast. We are loyal to Digital Ocean because it's a great
service but also because it's family. We could have just as easily went AWS.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that it's a slight oversight and
they'll bring this offer to their roots.

------
mck-
This is interesting, given that they are a Techstars company. I sure hope that
they're going to up their credits for Techstars companies as well (currently
at $10k, which is generous, but man.. $250k is 25x more!)

------
ditonal
Digital Ocean is really great for hobbyists and side project. I especially
admire their community tutorials, which hosts tons of great content and I'm
sure has been very valuable marketing for their products. With that said, I
think trying to build a real startup on DO would be a big mistake. They simply
don't offer the suite of products that the bigger cloud offerings do, and as
clouds become more sophisticated, companies using them will have huge
competitive advantages. From my perspective, tools like PaaS, Lambda, managed
databases, big data/analytic tools etc are getting increasingly sophisticated.
Using them now is a bit like a late 90s company using Python to code circles
around companies sticking familiar, stable C++, where in this analogy C+ +is
the equivalent to DO's basic VPS offerings that you use to cobble together
what you need (stable and familiar, but ultimately less powerful and requires
much more developer time to use effectively).

~~~
aprdm
sorry can you be more explicit on what would be hard when scaling with DO?

also, it's mainly just for your app hosting, right? You can use DO and RDS /
Dynamo DB / Lambda etc...

------
sbose78
If they are already a YC Startup, they are probably the ones who least need a
$250k DO Credits.

------
paulofilip3
Good initiative. Wrong target. That's giving credit to those who need it
less... I'm pretty sure, YC backed startups have plenty $$ for hosting.

~~~
paulofilip3
Why not to all startups?? Like a proper startups program...

------
brianbreslin
Does anyone know the community manager or equivalent person at DO?

~~~
andrewsomething
/me waves

~~~
blhack
I've been doing some into to linux/web development workshops at my hackerspace
lately, would you guys every be interested in sponsoring one with some DO
credits? (Like the first month free or something?).

Also, I have some bad feedback for you (sorry). We ran a workshop last night,
and during the workshop, everybody signed up for an account (about 15 people
at once). Presumably because we were all connecting from the same place,
people started getting "fraud alert" (or whatever you guys were calling it)
problems, and had to do additional steps to verify their accounts.

One guy actually had somebody asking for his passport (wat?), and then for
links to his social media profiles. That seems EXTREMELY skeezy. It also
ground the workshop more-or-less to a halt.

Is there somebody that I can talk to in advance next time so that the same
thing doesn't happen again?

~~~
andrewsomething
Sorry to hear that. That does sound incredibly frustrating. Send me an email
at asb@digitalocean.com We can discuss how DO can support your hackerspace,
and I can take a deeper look into why you got caught up in our verification
process.

------
randomdrake
> their customer success team offers excellent support

Just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I did not find this to be case. I
received _terrible_ support, responses, and lack of responses from Digital
Ocean to the point that I no longer use their services for anything serious.

Here's one of the issues I experienced before I pulled the plug:

I wanted to perform the simple task of creating an image from a backup and
spinning it up into a server so I could have a duplicate dev server. Seemed
very straightforward. Clicked a few buttons in their "dead simple" control
panel.

Their timer said "57 seconds remaining" but it never finished. I tried to
contact support. 3.5 hours later I received a message saying that it could
take hours to complete due to them:

 _" zeroing out the storage space to be used in order to ensure previous data
in those blocks are erased."_

I was further told that the advertised timer works for their images they have
already setup, but everything else they couldn't give any ETA on. So, the
timer was just eye candy not really attached to anything:

 _" Unfortunately, this part of the process can take a while, especially for
larger droplets or droplets based on backups or snapshots. Smaller droplets
and those that are based on images we provide are generally faster and should
finish creation within the advertised 55 seconds, as long as the system is not
under high load.

It's hard to give an accurate ETA for droplets of this size since there are
many variables that go into the provisioning process, but note that the
process could go up to three or so hours if there's high load at the time. I
apologize for any inconvenience with this."_

I was attempting to recreate an image from a backup they did. It was of the
smallest droplets they have available and it wasn't near capacity.

The server never did actually get setup. Instead, just falling off of my "dead
simple" dashboard every time, never hitting active. I mentioned this in the
support ticket I had open, since the problem was obviously not resolved. Here
was the response:

 _" Glad to be of assistance.

We appreciate you being a Digital Ocean customer and please let us know if we
can be of further assistance!"_

This was the third person to respond on my ticket; a different person for
every response.

I left them and never looked back. You can find similar experiences on this
website or by some brief Googling.

Ultimately, DO is probably still fine to get things going or play around, but
I wouldn't trust it for anything serious or anything where you would expect a
timely or decent response to help you ensure you can get work done that day. I
_certainly_ wouldn't trust DO with anything even close to $250k worth of
operations.

~~~
zacharybk
Hey David,

Zach here, Director of Support at DigitalOcean. I found the ticket you
mentioned, no question that we did a poor job replying in 2014 to this ticket.

Since your experience a while back, I can tell you that we've improved
tremendously. There's no longer an issue where we can't determine the status
of a create. Also, our response time has improved considerably, and on average
for the past 6 months you would get a reply in under 30 minutes.

I'm going to shoot you an email as well about your account, but please feel
free to keep the conversation public if you have any other questions or
comments.

Thanks! Zach zach@digitalocean.com

~~~
softawre
Glad you're helping the guy out, but do you think it's a great idea to give
everyone his first name like that?

~~~
Tassels
It's on his Twitter account that's linked in his profile. ;)

------
orliesaurus
Is it 250K per team or globally?

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mrmondo
Is there any ETA of when digital ocean will be available in Australia?

------
rjurney
This website looks great, but feels like it is from a template. I want to know
which template, if you don't mind? If it is original, well more power to you!
Someone should make a template of your site :)

~~~
kbar13
of posthaven?

