
The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean - bevenky
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-rise-of-digitalocean.html?lucy=true
======
crazygringo
To people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's
competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same
price point):

It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-
simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to
use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it
all just works.

Digital Ocean is 100x easier and quicker to use than AWS, without
exaggeration. It's easy to start a hosting provider -- it's _really hard_ to
make one that is also really high quality, intuitive and easy to use, and then
cheap on top of it.

I've used Digital Ocean for a couple of years for small personal things, I'm
actually currently in the process of moving a bigger site from AWS to Digital
Ocean, at this point it's turning into a no-brainer.

~~~
mikeash
I've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use
as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's
Tokyo region fit the bill.

Holy _crap_ is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble
in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to
find the right place to go to get started with the process.

~~~
derefr
I felt the same way for a while, but eventually, while working on a large
cloud-based project, I had an epiphany: _the GUI is basically the phpMyAdmin
interface of AWS._

phpMyAdmin is great when you're first learning to work with the LAMP stack; it
lets you fiddle with values, manually create databases, munge columns, etc.

But.

If there are multiple instances of your system running "in the wild" (even
just within your own company), and their versions will ever have even the
slightest chance of getting out-of-sync? You _really_ want the entire change-
history of your modifications to the database checked into git. You want to be
able to take any previous sorta-known database state, and move it toward the
current well-known database state. To do that, you need programmatic
migrations.

And as soon as your software ships a "db/migrate" folder, (non-readonly)
phpMyAdmin access becomes anathema to proper configuration management.

AWS can be thought of as a big database that contains your EC2 instances and
snapshots, your S3 buckets, etc. At scale, you only want to interact with this
database programmatically.

So: if this was the correct hypothesis for why the GUI sucks, what would be an
expected prediction? That the programmatic APIs for manipulating AWS would be
great.

And they are! All the HTTP APIs for AWS--the ones you would use in any
automated provisioning script--are simple, clear, and pain-free. They're
definitely the "first-class" road to AWS, documented to heck, and it's clear
that Amazon itself dogfoods them directly.

~~~
avenger123
I would suspect AWS makes most of their money from clients that manage
instances that are in the mid to high double digits and beyond. For these
clients its likely that at some point automation has kicked in and the APIs
get the job done much better versus having someone spend time clicking away in
a browser.

~~~
nl
Most of their revenue, probably.

But I think there are plenty of mid-sized comapnies with multiple AWS
accounts, with many machines in each one where no one is quite sure what they
do or if they can be switched off.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Sounds like they need to hire someone to take care of that then.

Disclaimer: Sysadmin/Devops

------
davexunit
I currently use digitalocean for my blog, but I was recently pointed towards
this article which concerns me greatly:
[https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-
ocean...](https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean-
threatened-to-shut-down-my-blog-if-i-didnt-remove-or-edit-a-blog-post/)

If I cannot have freedom of speech on my blog, I will have to find a new
provider that respects my freedom.

~~~
bduerst
That's a bit of a stretch, even for equivocation.

Did you read the article in question?
[http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-
speaks...](http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-
on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/)

It took four comments, out of context, and made it into a slam. Bias of the
rant aside, DO says that it was because of a TOS violation on privacy and
defamation. It comes pretty close to outing where the person lives, what
websites they run, and certainly makes plenty of assumptions about the four
comments.

It reads like someone bitter lost an internet argument when they couldn't bait
the employee into saying something incriminating, and they wanted revenge.

~~~
slantview
> It reads like someone bitter lost an internet argument when they couldn't
> bait the employee into saying something incriminating, and they wanted
> revenge.

Exactly this. This guy baited someone to say something about his employer,
posted quotes out of context and with obvious bias. The guy seems like an
asshole.

~~~
driverdan
So what? The beauty of the internet is that it lets everyone make themselves
look like an asshole if they want. If every service provider took down content
from assholes we'd lose 3/4 of the internet.

~~~
estel
But just think about how pleasant an internet that would be... _daydreaming_

------
unethical_ban
Seems no one here so far has mentioned Rackspace.

Let's start by saying that DO has fewer features for a complex deployment:

No load balancing,

no private subnets,

(IIRC) no IPv6 at the moment.

No "cloud files" or S3 equivalent,

the scaling isn't as automatic as RAX or AWS can provide.

DO can't host Windows (which still matters for many existing operations, don't
fool yourself).

RAX gives more information and granularity on its VM levels.

Finally, support. RAX can do managed services, dedicated advisors, IT support
and servers for sensitive data. DO has none of this.

\---

There are two things DO does that I appreciate (though neither concept is
new):

* $5 hosting. RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength.

* Application deployments. The ability to one-click deploy Wordpress/Gitlab/etc. is pretty damned awesome.

DO is great for technically competent people who don't need a lot of
infrastructure, or otherwise have a consistent level of server/bandwidth
requirements for their servers.

~~~
nathancahill
Agreed, all of these features prevent me from using DO beyond weekend
projects. But these features are all on their to-do list. They are tackling
them with the most requested features first. BTW, they just added Private
Networking in NY2 (maybe more by now).

~~~
andrewmunsell
It is in all of their new data centers (NY2, AMS2, Singapore 1).

------
mberning
I tried them out a few months ago looking to move my infrastructure from AWS
to DO. I was experiencing terrible IO performance on a fairly expensive
instance. Submitted a support ticket about it. Their response was 'this is
normal'. Killed all my droplets and canceled my account the next day.

To me they are running a pretty transparent pump and dump scheme. Promise a
great service, sell it at a loss, get a ton of users, do a shit job of
supporting it, take on investment money, cash out early, profit.

~~~
nathancahill
They were having SERIOUS issues a few months ago. I had been scaling up to
around $600/month in droplets, and almost canceled and walked away. The IO was
horrible, packet loss was massive and droplets were crashing all the time.
Fortunately, they've gotten much better again and I haven't had a single issue
in 3 months.

I think they got really popular suddenly and couldn't handle the explosive
growth.

~~~
jcampbell1
I created a droplet that I was going to use for the production site. It is
currently sitting in a totally crashed state. I have no idea when it crashed,
or why, I just know it happened some time in the past month.

I am now nervous about moving to them.

~~~
freehunter
Any server you have running in any kind of environment where reliability is a
factor should have some kind of monitoring system. Maybe DO should offer this
feature like others do, but it's not out of the question to have another
droplet running a heartbeat monitor. That'd be akin to them charging another
$5/mo for the same service.

~~~
jcampbell1
I would of course do that before I migrated. I did have munin running, but
without alerts. The problem is that is crashed at all. My production server
has been up for 668 days, and the temporary DO server didn't last 30.

On the production server, I do ping the server every five minutes, but the
customer complaints always reach me before that system.

~~~
vacri
You can do what nagios does: ping more frequently, but not send an alert until
several pings have failed. It guards against a packet lost to the ethers, but
still picks up a failed service. Maybe ping every 30 secs, four missed pings =
raise alert?

------
mstrem
As the article is from Jun 2013 I should point out the following link (also
linked at top of article):

[http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com](http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com)

We have been publicly tracking DO at that address on a monthly basis (I work
for Netcraft).

~~~
drpancake
Wow, you guys actually redesigned your website!

(University of Bath CS grad here.)

------
gabemart
I'd be very interested to know if DO make a positive margin on their $5
droplets. I feel like I push a fair amount of data through mine, and plan to
push more in the future using a bunch of $5 droplets and round-robin DNS. I'd
feel better if I knew I was still a +EV customer.

~~~
jcampbell1
The hardware cost is the same. 128 * $5 == $640, they charge a fixed $10/GB
RAM.

They do have higher support costs, credit card transaction fees, and ip
address costs. They would probably lose money if the primary users of the
$5/month plans were doing punishing things like video encoding, but my guess
is the vast majority are no load users.

I once read someone that was doing hosting, said the larger plans were
actually more challenging. 4 high volume forum sites on the same host would
cause IO contention. Digital Ocean has SSDs and they mix and match sizes on
the physical host, so it should be less of a problem for them.

------
digitalsushi
I'm trying to find a VPS provider that can do IPv6 and multiple IPv4. Digital
Ocean really surprised me in having no IPv6 offering. What really surprised me
is that you can't get IPv6 on Amazon's EC2. You can get a v6 address for a
load balancer, but that's surely not the same thing.

Linode does actually almost fit the bill, except that they require manual
authorization for an additional IPv4 addresses. So there's no way to script
deployment of such a system.

I have gone through about 10 VPS providers and the message is clear: IPv4 is
fast running out. So it's especially frustrating when we can't even get v6
addresses yet.

(To pre-empt, no, it's not ssl web hosting in which I require an extra
address.)

~~~
scott_karana
I've used Ramnode to good effect, so far.

You get 16 IPv6 addresses by default, without even having to ask for 'em.

~~~
xxpor
16 addresses? Or 16 /64's?

~~~
scott_karana
16 addresses total. I suspect they've got loads of addresses available if you
ask.

------
lutorm
Is "meteoric rise" really an expression? Meteors generally go _down_ with
tremendous speed...

~~~
broodbucket
Meteoric: similar to a meteor in speed, brilliance, or brevity: a meteoric
rise to fame

I think the phrase exists in a quantum state of dumb and not-dumb.

------
jtreminio
My FOSS app [0] lets you easily configure a full stack LAMP (and other
configurations) server using Vagrant/Puppet, which you can then use to easily
deploy locally or Digital Ocean (and Rackspace, and AWS, and coming soon
Azure).

PRs welcome :)

[0] [https://puphpet.com](https://puphpet.com)

------
korzun
It would be interesting to see how many of those customers come and go.

I have and know people who use DO but it's mostly for early stage development
prior to moving to a dedicated/customers infrastructure.

------
andrewflnr
Serious question: is it really worth it for a company like DO to support
Windows? It seems like they maintain their edge by avoiding the kind of
complexity that Windows would entail.

~~~
loumf
It's a significant market, not just in size, but in willingness to spend
money.

I didn't find Windows complex -- One nice thing about the MS world is the
homogeneity of the stack, which makes a lot of things easier if it works for
you. If you want to run something else, you probably don't want to run it on
Windows anyway.

~~~
matwood
_One nice thing about the MS world is the homogeneity of the stack, which
makes a lot of things easier if it works for you._

Yeah, one of things I miss about the MS stack. The whole freedom is slavery
thing. If the MS stack has what you need it usually has a 'this is how to do
X' and it works well together.

------
asdf3asdf
Meteors don't rise.

------
TheMagicHorsey
If you are writing a Python, PHP, Go, or Java web app, I think using Google
App Engine is the easiest way to get your app live. DigitalOcean is easy, but
it still requires you to know a bare minimum of Linux-Fu. App Engine is just
brain-dead easy. You literally execute a deploy script locally. And as an
added bonus, if you use the Google datastore instead of their RDBS it should
scale smoothly too.

~~~
crassus
It works until you want to use PIL or LXML and need to compile a python
library with native extensions, or if you want to use a datastore other than
google's.

At least, you couldn't do those things a few years ago.

~~~
dagw
Your point about compiled python libraries is correct in principle, but it's
worth pointing out the GAE python comes with PIL and LXML (and a bunch of
other libraries) pre-installed these days:

See
[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/li...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/libraries27)
for a complete list.

But,yea if you need a library that's not on that list and uses native
extensions, then you're kind of screwed.

~~~
crassus
Oh, that's cool. It makes GAE a lot more appealing.

------
blueskin_
DigitalOcean need to get their technical side up to scratch. Still not having
IPv6 at this point makes them a total joke, and the security issues around
host keys and VM deletion seem amateurish. My main issue with them, and a
reason I wouldn't use them even with the IPv6 issue fixed, however, is the
censorship on-demand for the owners' friends.

------
jjoe
I feel like DO has no competitive advantage. They sell servers but then anyone
with a reasonable infrastructure and programmers on payroll can scale the way
they have. So while it's an impressive rise, it can't be taken for granted.
Because all could falter over night. That's just the nature of the business
and industry.

~~~
showerst
There are 4 avenues I think you can take in this market -

1) Price

2) Scalability/API (As in AWS style of instant spinup/spindown)

3) User experience for the dashboard and creation process

4) Configurability of your instances

DO is currently fighting on 1 and 3 with a dash of two, which I think is very
smart. They're not fighting with lowendbox providers for the lowest possible
price, but they're competing with linode and AWS for relatively low cost, but
with good stability and ease of use. You can't spin up/down quite as easily as
amazon, but they're not targeting that exact use case anyway.

I've moved a few things over to DO from linode and will continue to, because
although performance is a bit less, the price points are far cheaper. I think
there are a lot of people who use Linode/AWS for boxes that just hum along
doing some simple server task(s) that would gladly move to DO for 1/4 of the
price, as long as the stability/customer service is there.

I read a rumor on a previous post that they were working on a way to customize
an instances storage & RAM but at the current low price points, which I think
would be huge.

~~~
unethical_ban
You hit the nail on the head in a way I didn't regarding the core competencies
in the market.

I think RAX and Amazon kick ass at 2 and 4, and DO is working on 1 and 3.

~~~
bryanlarsen
I think #2 is a strong advantage of digital ocean.

curl
[https://api.digitalocean.com/droplets/new?client_id=$DO_CLIE...](https://api.digitalocean.com/droplets/new?client_id=$DO_CLIENT_ID&api_key=$DO_API_KEY)

I didn't need to look that up. It's a pretty standard REST API, with a bit of
overuse of GET to make it even simpler. AWS's API is a lot harder to use.

------
dalek2point3
I just setup a webserver and it literally took 3 minutes and one piece of
documentation reading. Very, very impressive. I remember doing this for the
first time on AWS, and it took a while!

[http://162.243.202.22/](http://162.243.202.22/)

------
recmend
I have used AWS, DO, Linode.

If you don't need the advanced functionalities that are only available on AWS
infrastructure, go with DO. DO beats the price performance compared to Linode
while the API, documentation, and support are comparable.

------
mplewis
Article is from November 2013.

------
mark_lee
To be fair, linode has better documents, the library, DO is getting better and
better meanwhile linode's documents grow slowly, partly because they already
have a large volume, I have VPSs at both of them.

------
xarien
Can we please stop using "headline grabbing math?" You know what would be a
more impressive growth percentage? Starting at when they had 1 server. If you
look at the chart, every other competitor save linode had faster growth by the
unit (as opposed to percentage).

However, with that said, my complaint is just regarding the article and not
with Digital Ocean themselves. I think they're pretty kick ass...

------
ap22213
Until Digital Ocean came around, I'd always thought it bizzare that there
weren't more serious competitors to AWS.

Under the 'competitive advantage' model, it is somewhat unusual that a
diversified company like Amazon could be the most efficient vendor at
providing a 'commodified', targeted offering like cloud hosting.

~~~
smacktoward
I dunno... it seems like the likely winner in a commoditized market would be
the one with the greatest economies of scale, since that would drive down
their costs and allow them to underprice their competitors. (If a product is
truly commoditized, then price is the only thing vendors have to compete on.)
And few companies have economies of scale to the degree that Amazon does.

This also provides a classic "moat" \-- the more sophisticated AWS' offerings
become, the more it would cost potential competitors to even attempt to
compete with them.

------
buster
Uhm.. yes.. So to read those numbers correctly:

"Amazon, Alibaba and Hetzner each get more NEW servers online in 6 months,
then what DigitalOcean created in its entire lifetime".

It's all about the wording.. Not to downplay DigitalOceans achievement,
though. But people should look at those statistics in another way...

------
swah
No cheap VPS in latin america, unfortunately... at least we have AWS in SP.

------
simonlporter
Have you taken a look at www.bluemix.net ? The beta version of IBMs new open
cloud platform for developers that includes access to Watson - the cognitive
computing platform that won Jeopardy

------
akerl_
The growth chart is missing "IPv6 Addresses".

~~~
andrewmunsell
Based on your comment, I'm not sure if you know this, but DigitalOcean doesn't
offer Ipv6 at any of their data centers right now, so it'd just be a flat line
at 0.

~~~
korzun
I think he means that the statistics do not include IPV6 space other providers
use.

------
0-
yeah they are growing, we noticed: my "ids" sensors grab malicious traffic
originating from their ranges more frequently, compared to those originating
from aws (which are plenty as well).

------
simonlporter
have you taken a look at www.bluemix.net the new beta platform from IBM for
developers ? It includes access to Watson - the cognitive computing capability

