
Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling - bjenik
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/digital-oceans-journey-from-techstars-reject-to-cloud-hosting-darling/
======
Nux
Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's
I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff.

You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all
of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously
(hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace,
HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud standards" in order to succeed.

You just need to market it and promote it right.

I'm not even sarcastic or anything. As a techie I always frickin overlook it
and this is the single most important element that can help you make serious
money/business.

There's a whole bunch of people out there who don't know shit or don't really
care about how great your product is technically (or not ;> ). All you need is
it satisfies some basic "need" and a shiny packaging, it's enough to go out
there and get some milk flowing in.

Kudos to the DO folk!

~~~
stormbrew
I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's
_incredibly easy_ to use while providing all the baseline features I actually
need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I
think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to
make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very
similar niche.

In fact, part of the appeal may be that they _don 't_ use openstack, because
openstack implementations to date have all been quite limited and complicated
so far.

~~~
hyp0
Yes. Two parts of business: engineering and marketing.

Two parts of marketing: promotion and meeting needs.

The key "marketing" of DO was:

    
    
      Existing providers offered pricing plans that were too complicated and platforms
      that weren’t always meeting the needs of their users.
    

It's not enough to make a "better" product, technically. You have to make a
product that _better meets user needs_ (relative to existing alternatives).

------
comice
Article doesn't disclose that Crunchfund has a stake in DO.

------
larrys
Totally misleading linkbait title.

Sure they were "rejected" by NYC (for valid reasons - apparently treated very
well) but then went into the Boulder program after applying. And no doubt the
reference given by Tisch must have certainly helped I'm guessing.

------
frakkingcylons
I know that TechCrunch isn't interested in discussing any actually useful
details of what made DO successful...but for me it came down to them doubling
the RAM per instance and using SSDs in 01/2013, creating a collection of
excellent sysadmin articles, and cheap/free backups and images.

~~~
rythie
I used slicehost, though when it became rackspace cloud it became way more
complicated. The main draw for me was the $5/month pricing combined with a $50
voucher they gave for black friday and they use SSDs. Even with all those
benefits there are still switching costs due to having to re-setup on the new
host, though I imagine most of their growth is people starting new projects.

------
priyankt
My opinion. I am a DO user and I don't think you can use it for production
application. Casual hosting is fine.

For production servers, deterministic backups are very important. DO does not
provide that. I faced a lot of issues when transitioning my server from non-
backup to backup mode. To do that, you need to take a snapshot(server shutdown
is required for this)of server. Then, you need to destroy it to get the same
ip. There is a chance that your ip may go to someone else & any services that
are dependent on ip may need changes. I was lucky to loose the ip for a while
& get it back after some trial & error.

Also, you don't have any control on the backup. It is taken by the system and
is supposed to be anywhere between 2-3 days.

~~~
xur17
Are those the only backups you take? I have all of my code stored in git, and
my database (and assorted files) get backed up each night to aws. I figure a
snapshot is my first line of defense, and aws is my backup in case this
doesn't work.

------
joshmn
DigitalOcean is not a cloud or anything that resembles what a "cloud" is.

If you consider "cloud" hosting backup-enabled virtual private servers with
multiple operating-system choices and multiple locations, well, hate to break
it to you, but that's has been around since 2005.

Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of
a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other
than that, there's really nothing special about it.

Source: me; hosting-industry expert.

~~~
ohashi
>Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of
a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other
than that, there's really nothing special about it.

The marketing is good. The quality of the product is good. It's incredibly
easy to get started with. The tech accelerator I don't think plays any factor.
I searched my database and there are 24 mentions of TechStars out of 3213
positive mentions. That's 0.7%, I can't imagine it has much impact right now
on their growth. To give some other comps cheap is 115, affordable is 36, ssd
is 133, fast is 174, amazing 212, easy is 134.

Source:
[http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean](http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean)

~~~
joshmn
The marketing is false though.

That would mean I can go ahead and market a Galaxy S6 as an Apple device and
watch all the fanboys and teenage girls hop on. But of course I need pretty
colors.

~~~
ohashi
I measure what people are actually saying about them. People seem pretty
happy. You can pontificate all you want, but I am looking at thousands of
people's opinions on them, the consensus is that it's pretty good.

If your complaint is the marketing about 'cloud' is false, then cloud
computing in general is a pretty ambiguous term. It's being used for things as
simple as a VPS in the industry. It's pretty meaningless at this point, people
will use it to market their products and I don't think they are wrong. I still
couldn't tell you where the line is drawn and I've been around this business
for ages.

------
teekert
I really loved DO, that is until they emailed me that my server had to be
rebooted and I found it with all the config files being replaced by a bunch of
@@@'s (I had to use the browser VNC to log in).

I asked them what had happened and if it can be fixed, they tell me to make a
new droplet. I ask what will prevent this from happening again... no
response...

Bye bye DO.

------
coreymgilmore
DO really is a tremendous product. The simplicity, pricing, and speed of
setting up an instance is awesome. For setting up a quick dev environment or a
simple host for X or Y, it is definitely easier than through AWS.

I use DO pretty often and I hope they have some cool new offerings in the
future. Maybe really simple load balancing?

~~~
ycombasks
I wish they could address these issues:
[http://www.redbottledesign.com/blog/five-reasons-why-you-
sho...](http://www.redbottledesign.com/blog/five-reasons-why-you-shouldnt-
choose-digital-ocean-your-next-project)

I think "There's no way to increase storage space without major down-time" is
the most important one. One hour of downtime is no good for production.

~~~
mobiplayer
You don't care much about downtime if you're using only one droplet for your
app in production, do you?

~~~
ycombasks
What if you start out small with one server, but then need to expand to
multiple droplets? You won't be able to without powering off and making an
image.

~~~
mobiplayer
That's bad planning, but unfortunately also a very common situation. If you
really can't afford a couple late hours downtime when you're small then this
is what I think I'd do:

\- Get a new pair of droplets in front of your current droplet to load balance
the traffic (HAProxy, Nginx, you name it). Point the NS records to those :)

\+ Why two? Well, you can't afford downtime so there we go.

\- Get a new droplet and manually clone the initial one, i.e. copy over config
and assets. Add this second droplet to the LB pool for your site/app.

\+ Manual work? Well, again you can't afford downtime so you'll need to put
some man-hours on this.

\- Now you can shut down the initial droplet and image it while the second one
gets the traffic coming from the LB.

Eventually you'd want to separate functionality on different servers, so try
to also plan that in advance. Also bear in mind that each 512MB costs like
$5/mo, that makes this solution work for $20/mo, how cool is that?

I agree there's room for improvement on DO's service, but there's nothing that
a good architect can't work around.

~~~
ycombasks
You're absolutely right. How about your MySQL write server? You typically have
one master that you update to and one or more slaves where you read from. If
you get a sudden burst of traffic and your master can't handle all the writes,
what do you do?

~~~
mobiplayer
I understand how HTTP works so I know how to scale it, but unfortunately I
don't have the knowledge to scale DB infrastructure.

Anything I say would be a shot in the dark, but I'm interested on your point
of view about this one. Caching? Write on two servers? In the second case do
you setup a cluster or you just load balance it with a third device/service?

~~~
ycombasks
I'm still learning this myself, but from the research I've done I've figured
this out:

1\. Most people don't go with two writes to a relational database (like
MySQL). Syncing is hard, and when it is done, it loses its relational
features. 2\. Common set up is one mysql write server, scaling it up to fit
your traffic, and automatically syncing it with additional servers where
SELECT statements only will be made. A random read server is selected if there
are multiple to choose from. 3\. This also means that in the application,
doing a write and immediate read on what you just wrote won't work, so you
have to code your application around that. 4\. In you app you separate your
connections for the reads and writes.

Now, in terms of making changes to the write server is what I'm trying to
figure out. Perhaps there's a way to make upgrades on one of the slaves (the
reads), then automatically make that slave the master and the master a slave?
Not sure, I'm reading a MySQL book (The MySQL Bible) right now that I hope
will point me in the right direction.

~~~
mobiplayer
Well, that was quite interesting, thank you!

~~~
ycombasks
No problem!

------
soci
I wonder at what scale a business like this is sustainable with this low
pricing schemas. Whatsoever, will it ever be?

------
politician
"rejection" \-- I had to reread that headline 3 times before I figured out
what it was trying to say.

~~~
neotek
"Reject" is fine, it means "a person or thing dismissed as inadequate or
unacceptable."

------
computador
What the HTML is that?!

~~~
computador
...was their catchy phrase on their earlier video commercial on Youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q)

I'm sure this contributed in a way to their current success

------
jaequery
i dont know why but i'm so tired of these posts

