
DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS - beigeotter
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/06/digitalocean-raises-37-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techcrunch%2Ffundings-exits+%28TechCrunch+%C2%BB+Fundings+%26+Exits%29
======
bananas
Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing:

* kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes.

* can't resize or add storage

* no freebsd support or custom kernels

* VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one.

* no IPv6

* somewhat shonky security reputation.

* cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been given even after filling in numerous forms at yahoo.

Apart from that, they're the best hosts out there. I pick them over Linode,
Hetzner and EC2 but not colo. Even at the price point they're at.

~~~
fuzzix
Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either.

[https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/](https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/)

An odd experience, I would say.

~~~
MichaelGG
Regardless of the truthiness of this blogpost, their ToS actually includes
this gem (repeated twice actually, due to poor editing):

 _3.13 Subscribers may not use the Services in a manner that would violate the
lawful privacy rights of any person, ... or embarrass, which shall be
determined in DigitalOcean’s sole and absolute discretion._

So... if someone gets embarrassed by what you put up, DO just decides to take
it down.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/](https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/)

~~~
raiyu
We try to provide the best cloud experience possible and part of that is
following up on abuse complaints, otherwise we end up with blacklisted IPs and
other issues that impact customer service.

There are occasional weird situations like this that come up and I would love
to handle every support request directly but unfortunately that's not
possible.

We've had to scale the support team to support over 100,000 customers and we
didn't get the right customer support director on board till about 2 months
ago.

We are constantly looking to improve our service in all areas and Zach is on
top of it to ensure that all of our customer support staff get more training
in how to better respond to customers.

However, the promise that I make is that if any situation ever arises in any
way shape or form with DigitalOcean please contact me directly - moisey ---
a-t --- digital0cean - and I will be on top of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps in response to this issue.

Thanks, Moisey

~~~
MichaelGG
Can you elaborate on "blacklisted IPs" for hosting content? For spam or
compromised boxes, sure. For hosting a webpage that "embarrasses" someone?

At any rate, I have no way of knowing about this issue. It's just curious that
DO would put embarrassment as a ToS violation. All sorts of stuff embarrasses
all sorts of people. Might as well just put up "DO reserves the right to
terminate your services, at any time, without reason."

~~~
beachstartup
celebrity photos are huge, huge business. sites pop up all the time trying to
monetize papparazzi shots and hosting providers have to deal with all sorts of
fallout from anyone with a vested interested in the intellectual property or
famous name.

these people do not give a shit about the streisand effect. they are going
after their money.

~~~
MichaelGG
So in that case DO receives a DMCA takedown, they comply, and let the customer
deal with it? Or you're saying they file malicious lawsuits against the
hosting provider and courts happily allow these suits to proceed and don't
award fees to a neutral hosting provider?

~~~
raiyu
We forward any abuse complaints that we receive to the owner of the account
and ask that they handle them.

We try not to interpret the law as that is not our specialty of course, we are
simply saying that we would like that customers use the service for a non-
malicious purpose. But we're more than happy to open up a dialogue about this
and make amendments if necessary.

Thanks!

------
HorizonXP
I really like these guys. It's really no-nonsense hosting, which as a
developer, is exactly what I need.

I've been (stupidly) running my website, VPN, and e-mail servers all on a
single EC2 instance, mostly because I had a bunch of AWS credits. I got some
Google Cloud credits, so decided to move it there. I then realized that I'm
spending $60 a month on a single instance, which despite having "free" money,
is stupid.

I split everything up into Docker containers, and run them on Droplets now.
Sure, I pay $5/month now for each server, but that's fine. One of the e-mail
servers is for my wedding; I'll turn it off when I don't need it anymore. The
interface for bringing up new Droplets is simple and clean, and lets me do
exactly what I need to, no more and no less.

If you look at AWS or Google Cloud, there are so many available services that
it can be daunting to get simple things going. I mean, it's not _that_ bad,
but once you've seen DO's interface, you realize how unnecessary a lot of it
is.

I would still likely use AWS/GC for cases where I need to respond to changing
load needs, which incidentally, is exactly what you're supposed to use it for.
A DO + AWS hybrid infrastructure would be most ideal IMHO.

~~~
wil421
Agreed, as a beginner I found the amount of configuration that is needed to
set up an EC2 instance to be overwhelming. After seeing DO's interface and how
easy it is to spin up an new droplet I was hooked.

Its been a really great and easy testbed where I can test out new things I am
learning. Now I can get a VPS running linux serving up webpages with apache in
about 20 min. Add in the great price and I have been hooked for over a year.

------
tshtf
Broken DigitalOcean promises:

IPv6 in Q4 2012: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-
ipv6-ava...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-
ipv6-available)

Ability to boot own kernel ("2-3 weeks from Feb 2013"):
[https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
oce...](https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-
bootloader-?page=4&per_page=20)

~~~
raiyu
Completely agree with you, we definitely broke a few promises.

We ran into this problem because we were used to our development cycle that we
had in 2012, but in 2013 our growth really took off and we spent most of our
time working on scaling challenges.

That unfortunately pushed us back on a lot of different timelines. Now that
we've grown the company from 5 people to over 50 and with this latest round
we're finally catching up and able to move things forward at a better pace.

We are reviewing and reprioritizing our product roadmap this weekend and next
and will be providing more updated timelines and also issuing more updates if
we fall behind on the new estimates.

Thanks, Moisey

~~~
beachstartup
the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the
more entitled they feel.

not sure if digital ocean has customers in the $20k+/month range, but they are
by far the least demanding.

pretty incredible isn't it?

~~~
wting
> the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the
> more entitled they feel.

This is not restricted to web hosting, but common human behavior.

I've freelanced as a web dev and wedding photographer in the past. Low paying
clients typically demand much more than higher paying ones.

~~~
aduth
I've found that more often than not, this is because those who are constrained
to smaller budgets tend to be personally invested in the success of their
business where return on investment is of critical importance (i.e. small
business owners).

------
checker659
DigitalOcean banned me because I was using their server to fetch chromium's
source code so that I could git-bundle/rsync it's 12 GB mammoth of a repo and
download it to the third-world country that I live in (my network connection
is really bad even though it's the best money can buy). Apparently I violated
their TOS. As long as they limit their TOS to such narrow purposes as hosting
a wordpress site or doing straight-forward things, I don't think they'll get
too far. With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm,
as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game.

Good luck anyways.

~~~
mjn
> With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as
> long as I'm paying, it's all fair game.

For smaller numbers of instances it's true that you can spawn whatever you
want and use them for whatever you want, as long as you pay the stated rates.
But for larger numbers of instances you do actually have to tell Amazon what
you want them for, and your requested use-case "will be considered". You can't
just spin up 1000 instances and pay the stated rate without getting prior
authorization; the API will block new instances after a certain point. Here
are the default instance limits:
[http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2)

~~~
checker659
Well, 1000 was just a number I blurted out.

------
spindritf
_First, it’s cheap._

Second, it's integrated. Which, to me at least, feels much more natural than
AWS where you rent a virtual server, and then a database separately,
persistent storage separately... Because it's integrated, it's also simple.

And they have a datacentre* in Amsterdam. Even two of them, right in the heart
of the European Internet. That means latency to their servers is not
noticeable in much of the EU.

* Yes, yes, probably more like a cage or whatever they rent.

~~~
Kudos
What is integrated about it? They're just a VPS provider, which is a strict
subset of what you can do on AWS.

~~~
hiphopyo
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they a cloud provider? Ie. a bunch of
machines connected into a distributed network, acting like a single virtual
machine but with unlimited speed, memory and bandwidth, with the possibility
of downtime completely eliminated, and where one only has to pay for the
speed, memory and bandwidth one uses.

~~~
jcampbell1
Everything you wrote is wrong. Not sure what to correct.

They are a VPS. They do bill hourly, which makes them somewhat unique. They
were early to offer SSDs. Their pricing is great.

I don't want the "cloud". I want a really good VPS. Digital Ocean fits that
bill.

------
lallysingh
I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry
slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management
tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just
price and DC-location that differentiate?

And in that vein, wouldn't the winner in each area just be the one who bought
their hardware the most recently? Instructions/dollar are still increasing on
each CPU generation, but it'll take more than one generation for each machine
to pay itself off. So, whoever is closest to the current generation pays the
least per instruction, and can charge the least.

Or, maybe it's memory/bandwidth, which are mostly commodity, but slightly
bottlenecked by the hardware (e.g, max on a motherboard, NIC throughput).
Maybe the combination of prices in cpu, memory, and bandwidth leave enough
variation between competitors to keep the field a little open? I donno.

[1] Modulo concerns about their ssh key management. I haven't looked after the
last news ping on it.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
> _isn 't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing?
> After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of
> that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate?_

Well, I don't think it's like aircraft or auto leasing. More like apartment or
office leasing -- there's also a property management, maintenance, and
operation dimension.

You're not just paying for hardware in a rack. You're paying for electricity,
cooling, fire prevention, connectivity, and some level of uptime. i.e. You're
paying for not having to worry about a bunch of stuff, so you can focus on
your core business problems.

Even with standardized management software, at some point a human needs to go
into a cage, or deal with the backhoe emergency. (OK, unless someday Amazon
drones are deployed in data centers, instead of doing residential delivery.
:))

~~~
lallysingh
I like this analogy. It's like you're leasing an office for your program to
work in. It works well for both pricing and differentiation.

------
aalpbalkan
Classic TC title "to Take on AWS"... Don't make me laugh buddy. AWS is
probably more than 1,000+ people operation with 30 different products and a
marketplace, support and ops teams. DigitalOcean is purely a VM seller with no
cloud or storage features.

------
arca_vorago
I've been using DO for about 5 months now, and love it. I still host my main
websites other places (dreamhost, who, despite some issues, has been
consistent in improvement, and is fair in prices), and I use DO for stuff like
mumble servers, a few games, as a ssh proxy from less secure locations, and as
some as a shared shell with friends for various skullduggery and fun. Very
impressed with DO's service and price, but even more so ease of use.

My main issue is that I would like a hardening script, instead of having to go
through each new one I spin up and lock it down.

~~~
cdelsolar
I just make a "Skeleton" instance that has all the hardening stuff already on
it, then clone all my new machines off of this instance.

~~~
arca_vorago
I don't know why I hadn't thought of that, thanks for the tip.

------
blhack
I've said many, many times that the best thing you can do as a budding dev is
to spin up a VPS somewhere and start hacking.

A while ago, I started giving out VPSs to friends of mine to get them to stop
making excuses about why they can't code.

Digital ocean, at $5/mo, has made this really easy :)

~~~
icpmacdo
Hey man what are some cool things that you recommend I try with a VPS :) ?

~~~
voltagex_
* Try a programming language that you haven't tried before.

* Set up a static blog engine like Pelican [0]

* Learn Ansible [1]

* Try a distro you haven't used before

[0]: getpelican.com

[1]: [http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-
ocean/](http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-ocean/) (although this
really doesn't show off the power of something like Ansible)

------
hiphopyo
Love DigitalOcean. Sorta sad they still don't offer OpenBSD though.

OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the
world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant
firewall PF, and the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD --
the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration
syntax.

[https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
oce...](https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os-)

~~~
flavor8
Saw your OpenBSD spam yesterday too. Do you develop for the project?

~~~
4ad
The thought of OpenBSD developers doing any kind of marketing, honest or
otherwise is amusing. These are the last people that would do anything other
than simply letting the work speak for itself.

------
sneak
DigitalOcean are dishonest with their customers. It's sad to see such a
reputable firm throw in with people known to be liars.

~~~
middleclick
It would be good if you can elaborate your point and back it up otherwise just
saying this doesn't inspire much confidence.

~~~
sneak
[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/transparency-
regar...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/transparency-regarding-
data-security/)

The lies are still up on their blog:

"At no time was customer data "leaked" between accounts. This would require
that a user not scrub their volume after destroying their server; in this
instance data would be recoverable and should be considered not sensitive."

For a long time, if you deleted a DO virtual machine, it would not delete your
data by default, so that the next customer would receive it on the block
device to be recovered.

When I pointed this out to them, after it caused me a few thousand USD in
credits I had to issue to my customer (as I remediated DO leaking my
customer's data (through my use of the service)), they maintained "there's no
leak because we give you a checkbox".

There is absolutely no circumstance, checkbox or no, in which delivering my
data on disk to another customer is okay.

After I made a huge stink about it, it ended up at the top of HN, and they
switched to a sane default (scrubbing disks after a user deletes a VM). It
shouldn't even be an option, but there it is.

Despite all of this, though, they continued to lie about the root cause: they
were careless with their customers' data and trust.

It looks like they've hired some people who aren't dicks and have since
updated the blog post with sanity. Nice to see, but still: be mindful of how
these people conduct themselves.

~~~
blueskin_
Don't forget how they censor on demand for their friends.

[http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-
ocean-...](http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean-
threatened-to-shut-down-my-blog-if-i-didnt-remove-or-edit-a-blog-post/)

------
z92
I am running these services in a $5/month DO droplet: dns [named], ntpd, httpd
[apache], smtp [postfix], imap [dovecot], webmail [roundcube], vpn [pptpd].
It's taking 350MB off 500MB RAM.

Now after adding getmail to back up gmail I am now wondering what more I can
do with it.

~~~
bad_user
I tried installing postfix/dovecot but couldn't do it. Any recent tutorials I
could try?

~~~
shirkey
Had you tried this tutorial?

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-
set-u...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-a-
postfix-e-mail-server-with-dovecot)

I had used it to setup a test server and had no issues -- FYI, the date on the
article is today, but the original article has been available for a few months
so perhaps the article has been updated.

------
bowlofpetunias
AWS is a cloud service provider with a huge ecosystem of services. Digital
Ocean is a VPS provider.

It's like comparing a harddisk manufacturer to Apple.

Even EC2 is barely an overlap, since EC2 is a computation unit in the
convenient form of a (very ephemeral) virtual server, not the virtual
equivalent of an actual, permanent server. (And you're going to be in a world
of hurt if you use them like that.)

------
nissimk
If you can scale your system using only 0.5 GB per node, you get more cpu per
dollar since the 5$ and 10$ levels both have 1 cpu. Higher levels seem to be
multiples of the 10$ level. Does anyone have experience with this in a
production system with a lot of users? Are there horizontally scalable
database systems that work well on many nodes with only 512MB each?

~~~
jackowayed
Most DB systems will be tremendously helped by having far more RAM than that
to cache, and also usually by having fewer nodes than you get when only having
20GB total disk space per node.

The main place where I could see this being appealing would be complex
analytic jobs (since they're more CPU-intensive), but even so, if on 512MB
nodes it has to spill to disk because there isn't enough RAM (or transmit a
bunch of data across the network because it split the job over two nodes) and
on a bigger machine it didn't need to, you probably would have been better off
with the bigger machine.

------
da_n
Despite generally rock-solid performance and uptime, I had a bad experience
with DO recently. After experiencing repeated hardware failures on a node
(with lots of downtime), I followed the advise of their support and did a
snapshot and destroy of the failing droplet and immediately attempted to
create a new one from the snapshot. It failed to build. I then tried to build
again from the automated backup they create when a droplet is destroyed, this
also failed. Support just did not seem to understand the issue I was having, I
kept getting canned responses about doing a snapshot then building a new
droplet from the image, so I gave up.

The entire site had to be created again from backups on a different VPS
provider. Surely their system should be able to migrate any droplets off
failing nodes automatically, I mean hardware failures happen right?

------
zerop
I use linode and was drawing comparisons between two: 1\. 8 cores on linode is
what binds me to it. Linode rules here 2\. Digital ocean is cheaper than
linode 3\. More Network transfer in linode (minimum 2TB) 4\. Digital ocean
offers more RAM 5\. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. DO
Rules..

What else...

~~~
noir_lord
Rocksteady reliability, I've had zero unplanned downtime on Linode over 2-12
nodes in 5 years.

DO had lots of hiccups with it's networking when I tried them (though was over
a year ago so ymmv).

Everything I have on Linode earns me money in one way or another so they pay
for themselves, I currently have 3 nodes for a total of $60 bucks a month, DO
I could do the same for $15 but really $45 a month is nothing compared to the
cost of a machine going down even briefly (even if it takes me an hour to fix,
I bill more than that).

For me Linode hits the sweetspot of price/reliability.

~~~
cdman
My experience (running ~7 machines in Linode's NJ datacenter) was that around
once every two months I wake up with an email saying "we restarted server X
due to emergency maintenance". It's not annoying enough to switch - yet. And
EC2 has the wrong CPU/Memory ratio for me (too little CPU - Linode rocks
here!).

------
jmngomes
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage."

Looking at the feedback from their user base, and even rom my own experience,
different storage options would be way more useful than IPv6 or even load
balancing.

~~~
Kudos
It's been incredibly difficult to get an answer out of them on whether they
pool bandwidth[1], which would allow you to just build your own load balancers
on their smallish instances while leveraging the transfer included in the rest
of your clusters.

I finally got an answer last night[2]

1\. [http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocea...](http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-
ocean/suggestions/4141790-pooled-bandwidth) 2\.
[https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128](https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128)

~~~
stephen_g
Communication is my biggest issue with DO - I generally like their service but
it's majorly frustrating when they just refuse to answer any questions about
things like IPv6 (The best I could get out of them on that was 'Look at the
UserVoice page about it' \- which I already had hundreds of times over the
years. Not really a great answer since the latest post by then from a staff
member was something like eight months ago saying there's be a public beta in
October which never needs up happening)

~~~
neom
It's really just been a lack of people coupled with intense growth, till
recently we've been well well under 50. We're working on it, and now we have
money to add lots more hires.

------
erbo
I moved my personal Web hosting from another provider to DO a couple of months
ago. I'm spending the same amount I was paying the other provider, and I'm
getting a _hell_ of a lot more for my money. (I have two droplets running
right now, one with my Web server and mail, one running some network
services...and I have plenty of capacity on both to do more.) Plus, since it's
an actual VPS as opposed to shared hosting, I have more control over it. I'm
kicking myself for not having made the jump earlier.

------
ksec
Let's hope DO finally get their act together.

No Pooled Bandwidth Networking and Route, as well as capacity need some work.
Linode is much better in this regards. No Custom Kernels IPs Problem. Still no
deploy to different physical hardware by default. No Private Networking on
most of its DC.

And possibly many other small things i didn't mention. To me most of those are
deal breaker. And my problems with them is that are not fixing or improving
these problem quickly enough.

While Linode's SSD are quickly approaching, and has none of those drawbacks.

------
blueskin_
Do they have IPv6 yet?

What about actual security too?

Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player?
([https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/](https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/))

Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'.
That's just stupid.

Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better
than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price
gouging).

Full disclosure: Happy Linode customer.

~~~
broodbucket
News story about a cloud hosting provider?

Here's some dissenting opinions about them. Half of them have some sort of
merit.

Disclosure: I have a vested interest in their direct competitor.

Seriously, man? You point out some valid things but this post doesn't really
serve a purpose.

~~~
blueskin_
No IPv6 is fairly serious. As is censorship to the point I wouldn't feel
comfortable using them in case I angered Big Google at some point. Their
general lack of HA and resource shortages make them look like amateurs.

So what if I use Linode? I don't work for them. I use two other providers as
well. My 'vested interest' in them is limited to my VPS there running. I don't
get a discount for pointing out DO sucks and Linode don't ban me if I speak
ill of someone they like.

PS. Is a VPS host really a 'cloud hosting provider'? That term makes me think
of overpriced individual services that aren't a self contained system, like
AWS/EBS/their hosted databases.

------
timdorr
$37.2m on a $153m post? That's a pretty big chunk of the company to give up.
Looks like A16Z is going big on these guys. They're awesome, so that's great
news!

~~~
pdq
Most VC's want 20%-25% ownership. And DigitalOcean is a very capital intensive
tech company, needing to buy/build machines, pay for electricity, rent rack
space, and pay for bandwidth. Virtually all tech startups on the other hand
just need to pay for writing software and renting said machines/hosting.

------
ilaksh
Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or
less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so
cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or
triple.

The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know
if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers
of engineers.

The thing is with that much funding it doesn't really matter if their income
is greater than expenses. They can continue for at least another few years
regardless. During that time sane people who just need a VPS will take
advantage of it.

My recommendation for DO's business model is simply to set a precedent and
make it a policy that if you pay only $5 then you don't get any kind of free
support. That is the only real cost that sticks. So I suggest having a few
different monthly support options available starting at zero support for $0
and up. That is the main business issue a provider like this has is the
conflict between the desire to provide good support and the need to keep unit
costs low. And the solution is to separate support out. The main challenge to
doing that is sort of a cultural/expectations/marketing issue.

~~~
raiyu
Thanks for the great question. We are actually profitable on every virtual
server that we sell.

The reason we raised our seed round is that our growth began to outstrip our
ability to acquire hardware and grow the business at the rate at which our
customers were spinning up more droplets.

The second round that we raised was again for the same reason. Growth has been
completely unbelievable and we are humbled by the support that the community
has given us. We thought that our initial Seed round would certainly be enough
to cover our growth but quickly saw that growth was actually increasing so we
made the decision to raise a second round in a rather short period of time.

We were immediately impressed by Peter Levine's knowledge of the space and we
are super excited about having a16z on board as our partners. This round has
certainly provided ample funding for us to continue to expand not worry that
our growth is going to outstrip our ability to finance it.

Thanks, Moisey

~~~
stevekemp
I see from your site you're hiring for various positions, but currently all of
those are listed as NY only.

I spent seven happy years working remotely as a system administrator, for a
company listed in some of these comments, and wonder if this is something
you've ever considered?

I know that payment issues and similar might complicate things, but I'm
surprised there seem to be essentially zero remote-working positions
advertised for a company that will have round-the-world
clients/users/customers. (i.e. You're liable to get issues, tickets, and
monitoring alerts round the clock.)

~~~
toomuchtodo
I traded emails with Moisey previously, they're not open to remote work (and I
wasn't willing to move to NY).

------
whalesalad
Mark my words these guys are gonna be huge. Sure they are lacking in a lot of
areas (like bananas mentions) but thats why you get VC funding and hire a
badass like Jeff Lindsay ([http://progrium.com](http://progrium.com))

I'm really excited to see these dudes take on AWS with a higher-level and more
performant platform.

~~~
abhigupta
Seems like they are also highly lacking in customer service
[https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/](https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/)

------
dmunoz
Only tangentially related, but when did DigitalOcean redesign their website?

I think my initial dislike is due to it being changed, but there are tons of
minor usability issues that I never noticed on their old website.

I'm happy to see a view for new articles in the tutorials database [0], but at
the moment it doesn't make any sense. When I hit it just now, an article from
11 minutes ago is above an article from 1 minute ago. Not only that, an
article on the 52nd page says "less than a minute ago". From clicking around,
it seems like some process has touched every article recently and all those
times, and how they are sorted, are meaningless. Also, at the moment the new
and tending view gives the exact same outcome, at least for the first page.

[0]
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles)

~~~
btgeekboy
> when did DigitalOcean redesign their website?

Must have been very recent; I was on it just the other day with the old
design.

------
recmend
We run our infrastructure on both AWS and DigitalOcean. 1) DO consistently
beats the price performance. 2) DO has simple pricing model --> No ondemand /
reserved instances 3) AWS is more feature rich but DO continues to add new
functionalities like private networking and new data centers

~~~
twistedpair
Must be nice to have your providers competing with each other. Everyone knows
Bezos loves a good ole race to the bottom better than anyone. I suspect we'll
see even steeper AWS price cuts this year in response.

~~~
toomuchtodo
S3 price cut was nice. The EBS storage price cut was even more extreme (and
fantastic) going from 10 cents/GB to 5 cents/GB.

At Amazon's scale, you can make it up on volume.

------
pyrocat
Maybe they could spend some of it on hiring a better marketing team. Holy shit
those youtube ads are terrible.

------
samwillis
I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the
persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice
quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice.

I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and
increased latency.

~~~
t0mas88
Rackspace Cloud has both persistent disks for VMs (on SSDs in RAID 10, so fast
and reliable) and an S3 like storage system called Cloud Files. Sounds like
that's the combination you want?

~~~
hackerboos
They do hourly billing as well which Linode is missing.

------
morganherlocker
While not suitable for production operations, my go to has been a random one
man vps shop. I have used him for years, because it is the cheapest plan I
have seen. I pay $20/year per server, which makes it an easy decision to add
another one whenever an idea comes up.

------
AznHisoka
No matter where I go, the prices don't get any better than they do in OVH. A
240 GB SSD (2 X 120), quad core, 32 GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth for just
$60/month?

~~~
hackerboos
I'm with OVH.

I like them and they are cheap but if your server fails then it can take hours
to days getting back online.

------
viana007
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage."
A simple solution for load balancing and auto-scale will be amazing :)

------
instakill
I've been using DO for about a year, and I've been mostly happy with it but
that's because the project I run
[http://www.mybema.com](http://www.mybema.com) doesn't receive as much traffic
or active users as I'd like it to. DO has gone down far too many times in the
last year for me to be able to be completely confident in them with a 100x
userbase.

------
dharma1
took me 3 hours today to do a power cycle (reboot)

vs 2 minutes on linode

------
puppetmaster3
I use them for remote DC's (assia, EU, etc.) at $5 each.

Only their billing is a hot mess, mostly because they think it works and their
customers are wrongly entering the CC #. For 4 months now, same problem and
they have off-shore support that reads scripted answers. They just read the
closest answer related to billing.

~~~
blhack
Remote _domain controllers_? (Sorry, I'm missing something here, I think)

~~~
shirkey
Probably "remote _data centers_ " in this context

------
gregpilling
I am reading Ben Horowitz's book, and it is interesting to me that they made
an investment into the same field as LoudCloud 15 years ago. Maybe they were
just before their time.

------
fareesh
DO is great - I just wish features like adding extra disk space and monitoring
bandwidth usage were here sooner.

------
gidgreen
Digital Ocean does pretty well on price/performance at www.cloudlook.com
(disclaimer: my site)

------
thezach
I like AWS, and this is good for me - because competition is good for the
customer.

------
ForFreedom
In one line how is DO?

