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If a company's tag line is "For Developers Who Care", I'd expect more than a blatant rip-off of DigitalOcean's home page. The first part of the page is dominat
by mdasen 11y ago
If a company's tag line is "For Developers Who Care", I'd expect more than a blatant rip-off of DigitalOcean's home page.
The first part of the page is dominated by the demo on the right on both and the tag-line and signup on the left. The workflow for creating a VPS is basically the same right down to selecting an SSH key. Even the demo video is surrounded by the same minimalist OS X-like window. It isn't a standard library that they both share, but rather a visual copying.
It seems tacky to use the same home page. More than that, I've used a bunch of different providers (Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, Rackspace, OVH) and they all have very different control panel interfaces showing distinct development. It seems like they simply copied DigitalOcean's interface as much as possible.
Going back to the home page, the second part is a three column bit with info about the service and each column is dominated by a giant icon, just like DigitalOcean. Next comes the pricing boxes on each. Both have a "what people have said about" section. Both put another signup box right before the footer. Both have the same grey footer. Even the headers in the footer (like "PRODUCT") are all-caps like DigitalOcean. The whole home page is just a rip off of the whole flow and style of DigitalOcean.
The fact that they simply ripped off DigitalOcean's user interface seems to discredit their claim that they're "For Developers Who Care". They don't care enough to do more than blatantly copy a competitors design (and then charge a premium by mentioning the name "Swiss" a lot). Cloudscale - For Developers Who Like Making Blatant Rip-Offs?
That might sound harsh, but DigitalOcean has worked hard to gain its reputation and trust in the community. To have someone with no reputation (yet) simply copy their design, possibly out of a combination of laziness and trying to ride DigitalOcean's coattails, seems really crappy (especially when they're trying to claim that they're for people that care).
- nickpsecurity 11y agoSo, you're saying: 1. DigitalOcean is a good product people trust. 2. They copied everything about it. 3. So, it's a bad product that we can't trust? What am I missing aside from an ethical argument? If it's operationally like DO, then that's already an argument in it's favor. If it's just appearances, then it's a knock-off that ain't worth shit. I'm ignoring ethics of copying interfaces for now in favor of quality of service as many businesses will. Clearly, the interface will do just fine.
- hnampersand 11y agoBoth sites actually remind me of Twitter Bootstrap and one of their (commercially licensed!) themes in particular: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing (take a good look at the footer section) "Good artists copy, great artists steal."