

DigitalOcean growing faster than AWS - neom
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-now-growing-faster-than-amazon.html

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nkuttler
Is this a good thing? I've seen hosters go downhill after providing an
excellent service initially and too much growth. Maybe somebody with more
knowledge about digitalocean can comment on their architecture, scalability,
etc. or provide relevant links?

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djchen
DigitalOcean (DO) is VC funded so its very different from some "hoster"
started by some guy with rented server(s). DO can grow really quickly due to
that funding which you need to achieve economies of scale. The biz has thin
margins and you need volume to achieve profitability.

Ben Uretsky, the CEO of DO is also the CEO of ServerStack. I think I've heard
that DO is a sister company of ServerStack, but I could be wrong. The two use
the same datacenters:
[https://www.serverstack.com/infrastructure](https://www.serverstack.com/infrastructure)
So very likely one is piggybacking off the other and they're able to get much
better prices that way through higher volume.

DO also developed their own control panel so they don't have to pay a
licensing cost. Most "hosters" use WHMCS and SolusVM. Granted those aren't
hugely expensive but it adds cost if your talking about a $5 VPS. Also the
custom panel allows them to further automate most everything.

It can't hurt that DO is also giving away tons of free credit to new sign ups.
They must be getting tons of new customers from that alone.

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nkuttler
> The biz has thin margins and you need volume to achieve profitability.

Well, this is exactly what I was afraid of. Overselling of resources is my
primary concern, that's why price usually isn't important to me. But thanks a
lot for your insights! I'll definitely keep an eye on DO.

~~~
djchen
I highly doubt DO oversells RAM or HDD, though yeah overselling is so easy
these days. You can oversell RAM and HDD even with KVM. RAM is the easiest
with the virtio_balloon driver.

