
DigitalOcean begins CEO search - neom
https://blog.digitalocean.com/onwardandupwardtogether/
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dvddgld
I’m a massive fan of digital ocean, so I hope they continue in a similar
direction as they continue to grow into more corporate form. In any case, it’s
going to be exciting to see what they bring out this year to compete with the
ever-expanding and seemingly infinite offerings of AWS, especially with the
coming voice-assistants gold rush.

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mancerayder
As a user of AWS and DO (the former professionally, and the latter
personally), I wonder if it's even worth competing against AWS. AWS is vast,
vast: services built upon services that can replace almost all physical
infrastructure. Push-button deployment.

But it comes at a cost: the cost. AWS's pricing model varies from very good to
totally a flip of the coin: it can take hours to price-estimate
infrastructure, which includes the data transfer fees that vary depending on
how and where, and so forth.

DO is cost-competitive, so much so that until not that long ago they had
totally free data transfer costs.

The question is, can they build a niche and not get eaten up by AWS going
forward. Perhaps they're already doing that somehow. I just wish I could
recommend them professionally as a consultant.

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whoisjuan
If I understand correctly DigitalOcean aims to capture the market that sits
between shared hosting and the very first layers of managed infrastructure.
It's a product that makes sense for a company or individual who needs the
power of reliable cloud infrastructure at a fixed price and without paying the
additional premium for platform management (e.g: Heroku)

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simonebrunozzi
I wish them the best; however, I have to share that I interviewed there once
(recommended by one of their board members) for a CTO position, and the
experience has been the worst possible. They seemed not to know what they were
doing.

(of course I'm sure their version of the interviews is different).

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icpmacdo
Can you share more about the experience?

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mathattack
Seems like they've seeded a lot of market share to the other cloud providers,
no? I used to hear of them a lot 2 or 3 years ago, but now it's mostly
AWS/Azure/Google/Oracle. This isn't a comment on capability, just mindshare.

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showerst
DO is still a sweet spot for a lot of people when combining price, features,
and usability.

There are services with more features (the ones you mentioned), and cheaper
services (OVH and Hetzner, anything on lowendbox...) and those are their big
threats going forward.

In my opinion nobody has really nailed the ease of use for spinning up quick
server(s) + usability of DO's interface at anything near their price point
right now.

That said, OVH is coming into the US in force this year with aggressive
pricing, so if they can improve their UX a little they'll be a big threat.
Still, I'd bet on DO continuing to succeed.

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moh_maya
Absolutely agreed / my 2 cents.

I'm a scientist turned pseudo-programmer, and need to manage a few servers for
my team / start up. We are too small & early to be able to afford or justify a
dedicated administrator, and our requirements are mostly WordPress based sites
and a database server for internal use, etc.

I've tried to use vultr, linode, AWS.

But DO's interface and the wonderful, comprehensive support documents are a
huge huge differentiator.

We aren't using too many instances, (just 3, nothing complex, no webapps).
And, with their interface and support docs, this is something I've managed to
do on my own without any major issues. And I suspect I'm not the only one in
such a situation..

I was ok with the older prices; with the new, lower rates, I'm not even going
to consider moving, even if the competitors are at 1/2 the cost. It's not
worth the little money I might save...

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polskibus
Why leave the steering wheel when everything is going so well?

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bpicolo
Maybe wants to relax from the 6 years of long days and enjoy the profit he's
made. Can't blame anyone for that.

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samfisher83
Why do many companies look for some one who is outside the organization when
the people that helped you grow probably won't get that job. You are probably
have to spend some excessive amount of money and the results aren't going to
be that much better. Look at yahoo for example.

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jwn
Because the CEO skillsets to grow a company from 1-10 employees is massively
different than the skills required to take it to 100 employees.

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toomuchtodo
Why aren’t most CEO founders replaced then? It seems more often then not, they
remain with the org well past 100s of employees, regardless of experience or
skill set.

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dasil003
They used to be, until Zuck. Now the pendulum is beginning to swing back as
boards realize that not all founders have both skillsets.

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ShabbosGoy
DO is still my go to service provider. They were the first company that I
remember who simplified provisioning of a server. Their UI was also way better
than other competitors.

