19 ms·

$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

262 points by lacorp 11y ago

tshtf 11y ago
Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-boot-my-compiled-kernel-image-on-gentoo https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-b... Private networking is a joke 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isolate-servers-within-a-private-network-using-iptables https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isol... IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I bet this deal drives improvements on all of those points (or at least the ones that matter).
- rdtsc 11y ago
  > No custom kernel support How many people run custom kernels? I have used a kernel with realtime extensions enabled but that was a very special case and wouldn't run that in a VM anyway.
  - tshtf 11y ago
    > How many people run custom kernels? How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? Or with fixes to relevant issues?
    - rdtsc 11y ago
      > How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? How many people call that "a custom kernel"? Haven't heard anybody call an upstream distro kernel update a "custom kernel". Is this a typical conversation people have? "Hey Jim, did you update the servers to get the latest OpenSSL security fixes? - Yap, I compiled and installed a custom kernel". Maybe they need to run a better distro with faster security update response?
      - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        It's specific to VM images. "Custom" here means "not baked into Xen," since your filesystem is not considered when spawning a domU kernel except in limited circumstances. In the Xen world, your kernel is provided by your hosting provider. You can apt-get all day and nothing will happen. That is what custom means in this context. "Not yours." Read accordingly; you've made the same flawed point at several spots in this thread.
        rdtsc 11y ago
        Ah, I understand now, thanks for explaining. I thought they used KVM for some reason... But I guess if they use Xen they yeah, they are stuck with whatever kernel they get.
        jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        It's a slightly similar story under KVM in these scenarios. Customer kernels are trickier.
        rdtsc 11y ago
        Depending on what kind of level of virtualization they opted for, I've run Windows on Linux under KVM. They are doing the "boot a kernel" mode instead of fully virtufalized hardware mode probably to save on resources.
        11y ago
  - makomk 11y ago
    Very few people run actual custom kernels, but most people want to run the distro-supplied kernel for their distro of choice (including security updates to it) and most decent providers configure their VMs to allow custom kernels so that their users can do this.
    - rdtsc 11y ago
      > people want to run the distro-supplied kernel I read "custom kernel" as in "replace distro-supplied kernel and compile your own with some custom flags and patches".
      - makomk 11y ago
        Well, you can do that too, but the point is that you have control over what kernel your VMs are running and not the hosting provider. From a technical perspective it makes little difference where that kernel comes from; either you control what kernel you're running or you don't.
        rdtsc 11y ago
        I was at least thinking that once you pick a distro, they'd be first in line updating the security patches for it (or at least as fast as say your own ops team would). But I guess that is not the case.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      This is especially big for RHEL, OEL, and friends. Yeah, CentOS is cool for your startup but a big portion of the valley wants support contracts so they can stop doing OS grunt work, and if your provider doesn't roll RHEL you get to deploy your own, and AFAIK that is not possible on DO (and requires quite a bit of work on Linode, its closest competitor in the space; DO is not AMZN). Deploying RHEL in a supported way requires using their kernels. It's your virtual machine. You should be able to pick a kernel. This isn't for running Andrew Morton patches, as some of the comments imply.
    - guan 11y ago
- jorgecurio 11y ago
  Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious projects. I don't see why this is a joke.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - timdorr 11y ago
    If you want to maintain your server well and keep the kernel updated against security vulnerabilities, that's a pretty big deal. It would suck to be the victim of a root escalation and have no way of preventing it.
  - gruez 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031421
  - viraptor 11y ago
    It's less about customised kernel and more about an up-to-date one. You may want to patch at your own schedule (faster, or slower than DO). Any serious project will take updates (especially security updates) seriously.
  - mwpmaybe 11y ago
    If you want to run your own LXC or Docker you might need a custom kernel to enable aufs.
- mayank 11y ago
  > 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.
  - alrs 11y ago
    I would suggest that instead of trying to maintain shared state (which IP addresses are blessed) across all of your nodes, you look into using ipsec. Those internal interfaces aren't for security, they're to segment cheap/fast network traffic internal to the dc from expensive/slow/metered traffic that hits the Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_encryption
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Perhaps, but at the same time, you shouldn't be using IP addresses as a security mechanism. Assume the connection between your hosts is compromised, and code accordingly, with encrypted/authenticated connections between hosts.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      Not that I want to wade into the "don't use D.O." part of this argument, but, in practice, nobody does this. Virtually every deployment environment I've ever seen with more than 4 hosts in it would be fatally compromised by an attacker who could reach any IP address in that environment.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        True. I haven't heard folks other than Google explicitly talking about this as a best practice.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      A VPC is analogous to a physical network, not a subnet. Nobody uses them that way because it's not easy to grok, but you can treat a VPC as a physical network complete with your own numbering and ACL policies. If you're doing that defense in depth on a physical network, I'm impressed by your dedication but would avoid your work for wasting resources.
- Sebguer 11y ago
  User-managed kernels are currently supported on new distro releases, and will be supported for all distributions that are released moving forward.
- DanielDent 11y ago
  "IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards." Far more egregious is that they silently drop port 25 on IPv6. This means that enabling IPv6 will cause mail problems for some destinations (destinations that support IPv6, like Google). When asked they say it's because a /64 is too much address space in the hands of potential (ab)users. This fails to understand that an IPv6 /64 is conceptually similar to an IPv4 /32. (In fact, there are pretty reasonable arguments for assigning IPv6 /56s or /48s with the same semantics as how IPv4 /32s are assigned.)
  - joering2 11y ago
    I can't talk about port 25, but we have 15 mailservers hosted on $5/per pop with DigitalOcean and with properly setup rDNS and SPF including our IPv6 address, we don't see any problems with deliveribility to gmail via subscription port. That is on circa 600,000 emails per month sent to gmail.
    - robertcope 11y ago
      It sounds like you're talking about sending mail, not receiving it. Port 25 is only an issue if you're trying to receive email.
      - mwpmaybe 11y ago
        If you want to send mail as a peer (i.e. without using a smart host / relay) you need to be able to connect outbound on port 25, which some providers block.
    - DanielDent 11y ago
      You send server-to-server messages on port 587? That is... non-standard. But an interesting approach. You are using your users' gmail credentials? Or are you simply delivering over 587 the same as you would over 25?
      - 11y ago
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  > 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. This is really the only part of the list that I think has merit. I love Digital Ocean in general, but my own gripe is with their API and its lack of proper automatic key management: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/9307569-return-the-droplet-s-ssh-public-key-as-part-of-api https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...
- Sicp 11y ago
  you're the joke
- tschellenbach 11y ago
  Ok, no serious project would run their own kernel. What are you hosting that you want to run your own kernel?
  - timdorr 11y ago
    If you want to maintain your server well and keep the kernel updated against security vulnerabilities, that's a pretty big deal. It would suck to be the victim of a root escalation and have no way of preventing it.
- api 11y ago
  If you want a DO competitor check out vultr.com -- I've used them for years and been quite impressed. They seem at least as good if not better and they have some very interesting features like turn-key BGP and AnyCast hosting. I have no affiliation with them.
  - DanielDent 11y ago
    For the most part, I think Vultr has a better offering than Digital Ocean. However, I had an infuriating experience with Vultr recently (not that I have reason to believe DO would have done any better). Vultr has poorly configured DDoS mitigation equipment. If that equipment believes your IP is under DDoS, it will automatically blackhole your IP from their upstreams. With near-zero traffic on my interface - and for an internally facing VM, the IP address of which has never been published in any DNS, their DDoS 'protection' system decided I was under DDoS attack and blackholed my IP with their upstreams. I investigated and my conclusion is that the most likely cause was that their system mis-idenfied the overlay networking software I was using (which communicates over UDP) as DDoS traffic. I raised this issue with support, who did not manage to help. Amongst other things, they told me that they didn't retain logs long enough to be helpful. I agreed that I would raise the issue with them again should it re-occur. The second time they blackholed my IP, they didn't even bother telling me. And when I filed a support ticket, they took somewhere around an hour to even respond - during the time they've taken my system offline, I expect them to make themselves available. When I tried calling their parent company on the phone, they were downright rude with me. I understand they don't usually do phone support, and that's fine, but if you've told me that (A) you can only help me resolve a problem during an incident because you don't keep logs, and (B) don't make yourself available to me through your regular support channels, don't get pissy with me for phoning you. And especially don't completely refuse to do anything remotely helpful. I ended up terminating the VM and moving that workload elsewhere. I don't have time to be fixing other people's networks, especially when they can't be bothered to participate in the process. It's a shame, because their BGP & AnyCast stuff looked really interesting, and I'd love to explore their offerings more. But I don't currently have confidence I can deploy anything with them in production, because when something goes wrong with their service, they don't appear competent at making themselves available to fix things. (For the record, in some respects I consider one of my companies to be a competitor to both Digital Ocean & Vultr. But I like to be familiar with the competition, so I use them for some things. It also provides us a way to put workloads in locations we wouldn't otherwise be able to justify.)
- manacit 11y ago
  Custom kernel support is actually available for certain distributions on DigitalOcean, though it's not widely marketed. Right now, Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 and FreeBSD all allow you to control your kernel version. The next LTS release of Ubuntu in April, 16.04, will also allow you to customize your kernel.
- andrewsomething 11y ago
  There seems to be a bit of confusion about how we handle kernels at DO. Hopefully I can clear things up a bit. On newer distro versions (e.g. Ubuntu >= 15.04, Debian 8, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) we no longer use "external" kernels. You are free to compile and use custom kernels. We're happy with what we've seen, and with Ubuntu 16.04 around the corner our default distribution will have support for this as well. After that point, we'll be backporting the change to older releases. For Droplets still running with external kernels, we import new ones on a regular basis as they are released. If you happen to need one that hasn't been imported yet, just open a support ticket and the team will do so.
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    Are you planning to offer storage options? I find it's ridiculous to have to upgrade to a higher CPU/RAM plan (or add a new node) just because we're running out of disk space. We don't need detachable volumes or anything fancy, just the ability to increase the amount of disk storage.
    - andrewsomething 11y ago
      Storage is also an area we're working on heavily right now, and we should have some good news soon. We definitely recognize that there's a lot of demand for more storage without the need for the corresponding upgrade in compute power. Check out the update from our product team on this UserVoice request, and vote/subscribe to get updates: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3127077-extra-diskspace http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...
      - lobster_johnson 11y ago
        Thanks!
    - timfrietas 11y ago
      Product manager for Storage at DO here. I generally avoid comment on these kind of things but given the public statements already out there it is safe to say we are launching storage reasonably soon. If you are truly interested in participating in the beta program, email me at tfrietas@digitalocean.com
- Sephr 11y ago
  > 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards. Huh? I made a droplet just a week ago and it was assigned a whole /64. Maybe this is only a recent change, but you should know that it's here now.
  - X-Istence 11y ago
    Yep, but you are allowed to use only 16 of them. Check the configurable address range.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  > Private networking is a joke > 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is also the case at Linode. Besides AWS VPC, are there VPS providers that give your hosts their own private VLAN?
  - kentonv 11y ago
    Pretty sure Google Compute Engine puts each project in a private network.
    - vgt 11y ago
      yup, GCE gives you a "VPC" by default
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cddotdotslash 11y ago
  Let's add to this the fact that if you're under a DOS attack with DigitalOcean they disconnect your machine from the internet (making it impossible for you to log in and do log analysis, etc.), send you an email saying "figure out what's happening and stop it", and then reconnect your machine several hours later only to repeat the process practically as soon as it's back online (assuming the DOS continues). I wouldn't trust a side project on DO, let alone my business.
  - dayon 11y ago
    I was about to post this. My project received a DDOS, and I could not access my droplet for over 12 hours.
    - andrewthetechie 11y ago
      Just to clarify, DigitalOcean does not offer any form of DoS mitigation services so they blackhole during a DoS. Its for 3 hours, a lot less than other providers. If you've got a DoS issue, you definitely need a 3rd party DoS protection service. Cloudflare free works pretty well
      - cddotdotslash 11y ago
        It's not "a lot less than other providers". You know what happens when someone starts DDOSing one of my AWS servers? I get a CloudWatch alert saying "high inbound traffic" and that's it. They don't black hole the thing and cut off all traffic. Then, I can log in, see what's happening, and take my time diagnosing the problem. Even under a fairly heavy DDOS I never feared losing access. With DO, the black hole happens before the email alert. It's a terrible policy and I can't use or recommend DO until it's changed. I can't stick CloudFlare in front of every server I own.
andrewstuart 11y ago
Aren't there a bunch of offers of free cloud hosting for Startups? We should list them here. And you don't need to be a YC company...... Microsoft Azure gives hosting to startups under their Bizspark program - get over your prejudice - it's a great way to run Linux machines. Softlayer and Rackspace I think also have programs for startups. Any other companies offer free hosting to startups?
- jxm262 11y ago
  I'd also like to see a list. Is there something that gives a comprehensive list of resources?
- asadlionpk 11y ago
  Google has an awesome plan too https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
  - voidlogic 11y ago
    "In an approved Accelerator, Incubator or VC fund" so not so awesome for independent folks.
    - devsquid 11y ago
      They have a free tier 2. AWS actually has a pretty decent free tier for an entire year.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  AWS does as well. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
  - frgtn 11y ago
    AWS package, if I understand correctly, only includes training and support for non-portfolio companies. You're still limited to their free tier for services themselves.
brianbreslin 11y ago
Does anyone know the community manager or equivalent person at DO?
- nols 11y ago
  There are multiple, here is their team: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/about/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/about/
- andrewsomething 11y ago
  /me waves
  - brianbreslin 11y ago
    Andrew want to ping you about our tech non-profit in Miami. can you email me brian at refreshmiami . com
    - andrewsomething 11y ago
      Sure thing. Expect an email in the morning.
  - blhack 11y ago
    I've been doing some into to linux/web development workshops at my hackerspace lately, would you guys every be interested in sponsoring one with some DO credits? (Like the first month free or something?). Also, I have some bad feedback for you (sorry). We ran a workshop last night, and during the workshop, everybody signed up for an account (about 15 people at once). Presumably because we were all connecting from the same place, people started getting "fraud alert" (or whatever you guys were calling it) problems, and had to do additional steps to verify their accounts. One guy actually had somebody asking for his passport (wat?), and then for links to his social media profiles. That seems EXTREMELY skeezy. It also ground the workshop more-or-less to a halt. Is there somebody that I can talk to in advance next time so that the same thing doesn't happen again?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- aioprisan 11y ago
  How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.
  - wineisfine 11y ago
    Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.
    - mastazi 11y ago
      I'm not sure that I thoroughly agree with you re. documentation. I actually find the community tutorials generally very high-quality despite being user-generated and seemingly not curated [1]. Linode's documentation is not bad either, I just happen to particularly like the idea of community tutorials in DigitalOcean. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed. I could say the same about Linode and DO (beginners) vs AWS (pro).
      - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        Linode, Slicehost (RIP), the cornucopia of LEB, prgmr, DigitalOcean and friends target hobbyists and small fleets. Their model encourages precious snowflake named machines that aren't disposable and last a while. That model also falls apart beyond on the order of 50-100 nodes, depending on admin competence and documentation. (If you are holding 1,000 machines named after stars or authors or something together with sheer will, consider going disposable and ask me for a beer.) Amazon is playing a whole different game. Azure is there too. There's a middle, too, where Rackspace Cloud is ending up. They were headed for the Amazon game and seem to have lost momentum. Come to think of it, the middle is littered with those with their eye on competing with Amazon. With Google's default project quotas, they almost fall in that smaller bucket too (I was surprised by the core quota in particular), but the limits are easy to raise, so they're in the middle somewhere as well. That's how I'd frame this, not necessarily amateur/pro, but it does sort of break that way. Snowflake/disposable is also the sysadmin/SRE inflection point.
Gaessaki 11y ago
This is nice and long due regardless of DigitalOcean's actual merits. AWS, Google (100k), IBM (120k) and Microsoft (500k) all offer credits to YC companies. More options will compel cloud providers to provide better service offerings to startups. I wonder to what extent YC companies default to AWS though. Based on what I've heard from acquaintances at Microsoft, I'm not sure they're getting the traction they'd like.
randomdrake 11y ago
> their customer success team offers excellent support Just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I did not find this to be case. I received terrible support, responses, and lack of responses from Digital Ocean to the point that I no longer use their services for anything serious. Here's one of the issues I experienced before I pulled the plug: I wanted to perform the simple task of creating an image from a backup and spinning it up into a server so I could have a duplicate dev server. Seemed very straightforward. Clicked a few buttons in their "dead simple" control panel. Their timer said "57 seconds remaining" but it never finished. I tried to contact support. 3.5 hours later I received a message saying that it could take hours to complete due to them: "zeroing out the storage space to be used in order to ensure previous data in those blocks are erased." I was further told that the advertised timer works for their images they have already setup, but everything else they couldn't give any ETA on. So, the timer was just eye candy not really attached to anything: "Unfortunately, this part of the process can take a while, especially for larger droplets or droplets based on backups or snapshots. Smaller droplets and those that are based on images we provide are generally faster and should finish creation within the advertised 55 seconds, as long as the system is not under high load. It's hard to give an accurate ETA for droplets of this size since there are many variables that go into the provisioning process, but note that the process could go up to three or so hours if there's high load at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience with this." I was attempting to recreate an image from a backup they did. It was of the smallest droplets they have available and it wasn't near capacity. The server never did actually get setup. Instead, just falling off of my "dead simple" dashboard every time, never hitting active. I mentioned this in the support ticket I had open, since the problem was obviously not resolved. Here was the response: "Glad to be of assistance. We appreciate you being a Digital Ocean customer and please let us know if we can be of further assistance!" This was the third person to respond on my ticket; a different person for every response. I left them and never looked back. You can find similar experiences on this website or by some brief Googling. Ultimately, DO is probably still fine to get things going or play around, but I wouldn't trust it for anything serious or anything where you would expect a timely or decent response to help you ensure you can get work done that day. I certainly wouldn't trust DO with anything even close to $250k worth of operations.
- zacharybk 11y ago
caleblloyd 11y ago
Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year. It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money in the long run by developing efficient applications that likely won't come close to a $100k credit in the first year. This will also likely result in a much more scalable app and much less technical debt.
- andrewsomething 11y ago
  Yes. Similar to programs offered by other providers, this credit does expire after one year.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Apparently Bizsparks lasts three years.
- awinograd 11y ago
  Yep--according to their TOS credits expire after one year unless stated otherwise. From https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/ https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/ 5.8 As of March 6, 2015, redemption of promotional credit is limited to 12 months from the date of issue (unless otherwise stated), at which time the credit will expire. Upon redemption, promotional credit expires after 12 months unless otherwise defined in the terms of the promotion. For instances where promotional credit was issued or redeemed prior to March 6, 2015, that credit will expire on March 6, 2016.
rjurney 11y ago
This website looks great, but feels like it is from a template. I want to know which template, if you don't mind? If it is original, well more power to you! Someone should make a template of your site :)
- kbar13 11y ago
  of posthaven?
rjurney 11y ago
This website looks great, but feels like it is from a template. I want to know which template, if you don't mind? If it is original, well more power to you! Someone should make a template of your site :)
pcote 11y ago
>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies. I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses. That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.
- zanewill9 11y ago
  This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few startups that were caught off-guard. AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.
- toomanybeersies 11y ago
  The company I work at spends a lot more money on staff than hosting. This is exactly people use Rails in startups, dev time is mminimised, at the cost of speed, and hence a requirement for more servers.
bmh_ca 11y ago
As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have been similarly slighted.
- assocguilt 11y ago
  Odd use of the word ecumenical.
  - shoyer 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure the OP intended to write "economical" instead.
    - ossama 11y ago
      More likely "equitable"
    - geofft 11y ago
      No, I think "ecumenical" in the less common sense of the word, "worldwide or general in extent, influence, or application," makes perfect sense here. Or even in the usual sense of the word, if you're making an analogy between startup accelerators and Christian denominations. It's a pretty good analogy, since despite small differences in belief and large differences in culture and practice, everyone has roughly the same goals. A Lutheran might feel particularly slighted at a program that gives free choral music to Anglicans, because they sing all the same anthems and none of the differences are relevant, and so restricting the free stuff to Anglicans rubs in the difference for no good reason. This is quite different from the way a Buddhist or an atheist would feel slighted by not getting that free music. Given that OP claimed the feeling will pass, I don't think "economical" quite makes sense.
    - bmh_ca 11y ago
      Geoff's comment nails the intent.
mck- 11y ago
This is interesting, given that they are a Techstars company. I sure hope that they're going to up their credits for Techstars companies as well (currently at $10k, which is generous, but man.. $250k is 25x more!)
orliesaurus 11y ago
Is it 250K per team or globally?
ditonal 11y ago
Digital Ocean is really great for hobbyists and side project. I especially admire their community tutorials, which hosts tons of great content and I'm sure has been very valuable marketing for their products. With that said, I think trying to build a real startup on DO would be a big mistake. They simply don't offer the suite of products that the bigger cloud offerings do, and as clouds become more sophisticated, companies using them will have huge competitive advantages. From my perspective, tools like PaaS, Lambda, managed databases, big data/analytic tools etc are getting increasingly sophisticated. Using them now is a bit like a late 90s company using Python to code circles around companies sticking familiar, stable C++, where in this analogy C+ +is the equivalent to DO's basic VPS offerings that you use to cobble together what you need (stable and familiar, but ultimately less powerful and requires much more developer time to use effectively).
- aprdm 11y ago
  sorry can you be more explicit on what would be hard when scaling with DO? also, it's mainly just for your app hosting, right? You can use DO and RDS / Dynamo DB / Lambda etc...
tombrossman 11y ago
144 comments as I type this and I can't believe no one has mentioned OVH yet. I'm a happy customer of DigitalOcean, AWS, and OVH and my default choice for a while now has been OVH. DigitalOcean beats everyone in ease of use and UX, and AWS obviously has huge potential for scaling, but OVH consistently beats DigitalOcean in VPS performance and they include DDOS protection as standard. Test for yourself, fire up similarly sized VPSs at both DigitalOcean and OVH and benchmark them running identical tests. The DigitalOcean VPSs are pretty fast but the OVH ones consistently perform better for both CPU and disk speed. OVH supports startups just like the rest of the companies mentioned elsewhere in the thread too - see https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ for info. I have no affiliation with any of these companies except as a customer.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Interesting; I had never heard of OVH before. I currently have a bunch of stuff hosted on AWS and have been looking at digital ocean pricing; I'll add this to the list of places to check out. Thanks!
  - joeyspn 11y ago
    OVH is well known here in Europe, they were the counterpart to USA's "The Planet" (merged with SoftLayer). If you wanted dedicated servers in the EU during the early 2000s, the preferred option was always OVH...
- tajen 11y ago
  OVH is a French group, submitted to the new Jan 2015 law about spying. Read this for more information: https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillance-law https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillan...
  - kuschku 11y ago
    So, they have the same situation as DO, practically (where we can be sure that the NSA has some backdoor in the systems).
arrty88 11y ago
I'm sure this has been said already, but this is a pretty big slap in the face to startups not in a fancy incubator program, which probably already have everything else going for them. It's like giving a big check to someone who already won a full ride to a top university, no?
- andreamazz 11y ago
  I share your feeling. We are running our cloud platform on AWS, and it's hard to offer competitive prices when you are not founded and the AWS bills kick your ass. We are in an university incubator that gives us the office space (we pay a 'friendly' rent) and that's it. I realize it's a petty feeling, but...
sbose78 11y ago
If they are already a YC Startup, they are probably the ones who least need a $250k DO Credits.
goeric 11y ago
I think it's great that DO is offering this, but it's a little shocking they don't offer this to fellow Techstars alum. We only get $10K in credits, which is a stark contrast. We are loyal to Digital Ocean because it's a great service but also because it's family. We could have just as easily went AWS. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that it's a slight oversight and they'll bring this offer to their roots.
paulofilip3 11y ago
Good initiative. Wrong target. That's giving credit to those who need it less... I'm pretty sure, YC backed startups have plenty $$ for hosting.
- paulofilip3 11y ago
  Why not to all startups?? Like a proper startups program...
mrmondo 11y ago
Is there any ETA of when digital ocean will be available in Australia?

262 points by lacorp 11y ago

tshtf 11y ago

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-boot-my-compiled-kernel-image-on-gentoo https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-b... Private networking is a joke 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isolate-servers-within-a-private-network-using-iptables https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isol... IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards.

pbreit 11y ago
I bet this deal drives improvements on all of those points (or at least the ones that matter).
rdtsc 11y ago
> No custom kernel support How many people run custom kernels? I have used a kernel with realtime extensions enabled but that was a very special case and wouldn't run that in a VM anyway.
- tshtf 11y ago
  > How many people run custom kernels? How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? Or with fixes to relevant issues?
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    > How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? How many people call that "a custom kernel"? Haven't heard anybody call an upstream distro kernel update a "custom kernel". Is this a typical conversation people have? "Hey Jim, did you update the servers to get the latest OpenSSL security fixes? - Yap, I compiled and installed a custom kernel". Maybe they need to run a better distro with faster security update response?
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      It's specific to VM images. "Custom" here means "not baked into Xen," since your filesystem is not considered when spawning a domU kernel except in limited circumstances. In the Xen world, your kernel is provided by your hosting provider. You can apt-get all day and nothing will happen. That is what custom means in this context. "Not yours." Read accordingly; you've made the same flawed point at several spots in this thread.
      - rdtsc 11y ago
        Ah, I understand now, thanks for explaining. I thought they used KVM for some reason... But I guess if they use Xen they yeah, they are stuck with whatever kernel they get.
        jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        It's a slightly similar story under KVM in these scenarios. Customer kernels are trickier.
        rdtsc 11y ago
        Depending on what kind of level of virtualization they opted for, I've run Windows on Linux under KVM. They are doing the "boot a kernel" mode instead of fully virtufalized hardware mode probably to save on resources.
        11y ago
- makomk 11y ago
  Very few people run actual custom kernels, but most people want to run the distro-supplied kernel for their distro of choice (including security updates to it) and most decent providers configure their VMs to allow custom kernels so that their users can do this.
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    > people want to run the distro-supplied kernel I read "custom kernel" as in "replace distro-supplied kernel and compile your own with some custom flags and patches".
    - makomk 11y ago
      Well, you can do that too, but the point is that you have control over what kernel your VMs are running and not the hosting provider. From a technical perspective it makes little difference where that kernel comes from; either you control what kernel you're running or you don't.
      - rdtsc 11y ago
        I was at least thinking that once you pick a distro, they'd be first in line updating the security patches for it (or at least as fast as say your own ops team would). But I guess that is not the case.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    This is especially big for RHEL, OEL, and friends. Yeah, CentOS is cool for your startup but a big portion of the valley wants support contracts so they can stop doing OS grunt work, and if your provider doesn't roll RHEL you get to deploy your own, and AFAIK that is not possible on DO (and requires quite a bit of work on Linode, its closest competitor in the space; DO is not AMZN). Deploying RHEL in a supported way requires using their kernels. It's your virtual machine. You should be able to pick a kernel. This isn't for running Andrew Morton patches, as some of the comments imply.
  - guan 11y ago
jorgecurio 11y ago
Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious projects. I don't see why this is a joke.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- timdorr 11y ago
  If you want to maintain your server well and keep the kernel updated against security vulnerabilities, that's a pretty big deal. It would suck to be the victim of a root escalation and have no way of preventing it.
- gruez 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11031421
- viraptor 11y ago
  It's less about customised kernel and more about an up-to-date one. You may want to patch at your own schedule (faster, or slower than DO). Any serious project will take updates (especially security updates) seriously.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  If you want to run your own LXC or Docker you might need a custom kernel to enable aufs.
mayank 11y ago
> 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.
- alrs 11y ago
  I would suggest that instead of trying to maintain shared state (which IP addresses are blessed) across all of your nodes, you look into using ipsec. Those internal interfaces aren't for security, they're to segment cheap/fast network traffic internal to the dc from expensive/slow/metered traffic that hits the Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_encryption
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Perhaps, but at the same time, you shouldn't be using IP addresses as a security mechanism. Assume the connection between your hosts is compromised, and code accordingly, with encrypted/authenticated connections between hosts.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Not that I want to wade into the "don't use D.O." part of this argument, but, in practice, nobody does this. Virtually every deployment environment I've ever seen with more than 4 hosts in it would be fatally compromised by an attacker who could reach any IP address in that environment.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      True. I haven't heard folks other than Google explicitly talking about this as a best practice.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    A VPC is analogous to a physical network, not a subnet. Nobody uses them that way because it's not easy to grok, but you can treat a VPC as a physical network complete with your own numbering and ACL policies. If you're doing that defense in depth on a physical network, I'm impressed by your dedication but would avoid your work for wasting resources.
Sebguer 11y ago
User-managed kernels are currently supported on new distro releases, and will be supported for all distributions that are released moving forward.
DanielDent 11y ago
"IPv6 support 1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers. 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards." Far more egregious is that they silently drop port 25 on IPv6. This means that enabling IPv6 will cause mail problems for some destinations (destinations that support IPv6, like Google). When asked they say it's because a /64 is too much address space in the hands of potential (ab)users. This fails to understand that an IPv6 /64 is conceptually similar to an IPv4 /32. (In fact, there are pretty reasonable arguments for assigning IPv6 /56s or /48s with the same semantics as how IPv4 /32s are assigned.)
- joering2 11y ago
  I can't talk about port 25, but we have 15 mailservers hosted on $5/per pop with DigitalOcean and with properly setup rDNS and SPF including our IPv6 address, we don't see any problems with deliveribility to gmail via subscription port. That is on circa 600,000 emails per month sent to gmail.
  - robertcope 11y ago
    It sounds like you're talking about sending mail, not receiving it. Port 25 is only an issue if you're trying to receive email.
    - mwpmaybe 11y ago
      If you want to send mail as a peer (i.e. without using a smart host / relay) you need to be able to connect outbound on port 25, which some providers block.
  - DanielDent 11y ago
    You send server-to-server messages on port 587? That is... non-standard. But an interesting approach. You are using your users' gmail credentials? Or are you simply delivering over 587 the same as you would over 25?
    - 11y ago
3pt14159 11y ago
> 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. This is really the only part of the list that I think has merit. I love Digital Ocean in general, but my own gripe is with their API and its lack of proper automatic key management: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/9307569-return-the-droplet-s-ssh-public-key-as-part-of-api https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...
Sicp 11y ago
you're the joke
tschellenbach 11y ago
Ok, no serious project would run their own kernel. What are you hosting that you want to run your own kernel?
- timdorr 11y ago
  If you want to maintain your server well and keep the kernel updated against security vulnerabilities, that's a pretty big deal. It would suck to be the victim of a root escalation and have no way of preventing it.
api 11y ago
If you want a DO competitor check out vultr.com -- I've used them for years and been quite impressed. They seem at least as good if not better and they have some very interesting features like turn-key BGP and AnyCast hosting. I have no affiliation with them.
- DanielDent 11y ago
  For the most part, I think Vultr has a better offering than Digital Ocean. However, I had an infuriating experience with Vultr recently (not that I have reason to believe DO would have done any better). Vultr has poorly configured DDoS mitigation equipment. If that equipment believes your IP is under DDoS, it will automatically blackhole your IP from their upstreams. With near-zero traffic on my interface - and for an internally facing VM, the IP address of which has never been published in any DNS, their DDoS 'protection' system decided I was under DDoS attack and blackholed my IP with their upstreams. I investigated and my conclusion is that the most likely cause was that their system mis-idenfied the overlay networking software I was using (which communicates over UDP) as DDoS traffic. I raised this issue with support, who did not manage to help. Amongst other things, they told me that they didn't retain logs long enough to be helpful. I agreed that I would raise the issue with them again should it re-occur. The second time they blackholed my IP, they didn't even bother telling me. And when I filed a support ticket, they took somewhere around an hour to even respond - during the time they've taken my system offline, I expect them to make themselves available. When I tried calling their parent company on the phone, they were downright rude with me. I understand they don't usually do phone support, and that's fine, but if you've told me that (A) you can only help me resolve a problem during an incident because you don't keep logs, and (B) don't make yourself available to me through your regular support channels, don't get pissy with me for phoning you. And especially don't completely refuse to do anything remotely helpful. I ended up terminating the VM and moving that workload elsewhere. I don't have time to be fixing other people's networks, especially when they can't be bothered to participate in the process. It's a shame, because their BGP & AnyCast stuff looked really interesting, and I'd love to explore their offerings more. But I don't currently have confidence I can deploy anything with them in production, because when something goes wrong with their service, they don't appear competent at making themselves available to fix things. (For the record, in some respects I consider one of my companies to be a competitor to both Digital Ocean & Vultr. But I like to be familiar with the competition, so I use them for some things. It also provides us a way to put workloads in locations we wouldn't otherwise be able to justify.)
manacit 11y ago
Custom kernel support is actually available for certain distributions on DigitalOcean, though it's not widely marketed. Right now, Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 and FreeBSD all allow you to control your kernel version. The next LTS release of Ubuntu in April, 16.04, will also allow you to customize your kernel.
andrewsomething 11y ago
There seems to be a bit of confusion about how we handle kernels at DO. Hopefully I can clear things up a bit. On newer distro versions (e.g. Ubuntu >= 15.04, Debian 8, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) we no longer use "external" kernels. You are free to compile and use custom kernels. We're happy with what we've seen, and with Ubuntu 16.04 around the corner our default distribution will have support for this as well. After that point, we'll be backporting the change to older releases. For Droplets still running with external kernels, we import new ones on a regular basis as they are released. If you happen to need one that hasn't been imported yet, just open a support ticket and the team will do so.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  Are you planning to offer storage options? I find it's ridiculous to have to upgrade to a higher CPU/RAM plan (or add a new node) just because we're running out of disk space. We don't need detachable volumes or anything fancy, just the ability to increase the amount of disk storage.
  - andrewsomething 11y ago
    Storage is also an area we're working on heavily right now, and we should have some good news soon. We definitely recognize that there's a lot of demand for more storage without the need for the corresponding upgrade in compute power. Check out the update from our product team on this UserVoice request, and vote/subscribe to get updates: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3127077-extra-diskspace http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...
    - lobster_johnson 11y ago
      Thanks!
  - timfrietas 11y ago
    Product manager for Storage at DO here. I generally avoid comment on these kind of things but given the public statements already out there it is safe to say we are launching storage reasonably soon. If you are truly interested in participating in the beta program, email me at tfrietas@digitalocean.com
Sephr 11y ago
> 2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards. Huh? I made a droplet just a week ago and it was assigned a whole /64. Maybe this is only a recent change, but you should know that it's here now.
- X-Istence 11y ago
  Yep, but you are allowed to use only 16 of them. Check the configurable address range.
mwpmaybe 11y ago
> Private networking is a joke > 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is also the case at Linode. Besides AWS VPC, are there VPS providers that give your hosts their own private VLAN?
- kentonv 11y ago
  Pretty sure Google Compute Engine puts each project in a private network.
  - vgt 11y ago
    yup, GCE gives you a "VPC" by default
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cddotdotslash 11y ago
Let's add to this the fact that if you're under a DOS attack with DigitalOcean they disconnect your machine from the internet (making it impossible for you to log in and do log analysis, etc.), send you an email saying "figure out what's happening and stop it", and then reconnect your machine several hours later only to repeat the process practically as soon as it's back online (assuming the DOS continues). I wouldn't trust a side project on DO, let alone my business.
- dayon 11y ago
  I was about to post this. My project received a DDOS, and I could not access my droplet for over 12 hours.
  - andrewthetechie 11y ago
    Just to clarify, DigitalOcean does not offer any form of DoS mitigation services so they blackhole during a DoS. Its for 3 hours, a lot less than other providers. If you've got a DoS issue, you definitely need a 3rd party DoS protection service. Cloudflare free works pretty well
    - cddotdotslash 11y ago
      It's not "a lot less than other providers". You know what happens when someone starts DDOSing one of my AWS servers? I get a CloudWatch alert saying "high inbound traffic" and that's it. They don't black hole the thing and cut off all traffic. Then, I can log in, see what's happening, and take my time diagnosing the problem. Even under a fairly heavy DDOS I never feared losing access. With DO, the black hole happens before the email alert. It's a terrible policy and I can't use or recommend DO until it's changed. I can't stick CloudFlare in front of every server I own.

andrewstuart 11y ago

Aren't there a bunch of offers of free cloud hosting for Startups? We should list them here. And you don't need to be a YC company...... Microsoft Azure gives hosting to startups under their Bizspark program - get over your prejudice - it's a great way to run Linux machines. Softlayer and Rackspace I think also have programs for startups. Any other companies offer free hosting to startups?

jxm262 11y ago
I'd also like to see a list. Is there something that gives a comprehensive list of resources?
asadlionpk 11y ago
Google has an awesome plan too https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
- voidlogic 11y ago
  "In an approved Accelerator, Incubator or VC fund" so not so awesome for independent folks.
  - devsquid 11y ago
    They have a free tier 2. AWS actually has a pretty decent free tier for an entire year.
ceejayoz 11y ago
AWS does as well. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
- frgtn 11y ago
  AWS package, if I understand correctly, only includes training and support for non-portfolio companies. You're still limited to their free tier for services themselves.

brianbreslin 11y ago

Does anyone know the community manager or equivalent person at DO?

nols 11y ago
There are multiple, here is their team: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/about/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/about/
andrewsomething 11y ago
/me waves
- brianbreslin 11y ago
  Andrew want to ping you about our tech non-profit in Miami. can you email me brian at refreshmiami . com
  - andrewsomething 11y ago
    Sure thing. Expect an email in the morning.
- blhack 11y ago
  I've been doing some into to linux/web development workshops at my hackerspace lately, would you guys every be interested in sponsoring one with some DO credits? (Like the first month free or something?). Also, I have some bad feedback for you (sorry). We ran a workshop last night, and during the workshop, everybody signed up for an account (about 15 people at once). Presumably because we were all connecting from the same place, people started getting "fraud alert" (or whatever you guys were calling it) problems, and had to do additional steps to verify their accounts. One guy actually had somebody asking for his passport (wat?), and then for links to his social media profiles. That seems EXTREMELY skeezy. It also ground the workshop more-or-less to a halt. Is there somebody that I can talk to in advance next time so that the same thing doesn't happen again?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

aioprisan 11y ago
How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.
- wineisfine 11y ago
  Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.
  - mastazi 11y ago
    I'm not sure that I thoroughly agree with you re. documentation. I actually find the community tutorials generally very high-quality despite being user-generated and seemingly not curated [1]. Linode's documentation is not bad either, I just happen to particularly like the idea of community tutorials in DigitalOcean. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed. I could say the same about Linode and DO (beginners) vs AWS (pro).
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      Linode, Slicehost (RIP), the cornucopia of LEB, prgmr, DigitalOcean and friends target hobbyists and small fleets. Their model encourages precious snowflake named machines that aren't disposable and last a while. That model also falls apart beyond on the order of 50-100 nodes, depending on admin competence and documentation. (If you are holding 1,000 machines named after stars or authors or something together with sheer will, consider going disposable and ask me for a beer.) Amazon is playing a whole different game. Azure is there too. There's a middle, too, where Rackspace Cloud is ending up. They were headed for the Amazon game and seem to have lost momentum. Come to think of it, the middle is littered with those with their eye on competing with Amazon. With Google's default project quotas, they almost fall in that smaller bucket too (I was surprised by the core quota in particular), but the limits are easy to raise, so they're in the middle somewhere as well. That's how I'd frame this, not necessarily amateur/pro, but it does sort of break that way. Snowflake/disposable is also the sysadmin/SRE inflection point.

Gaessaki 11y ago

This is nice and long due regardless of DigitalOcean's actual merits. AWS, Google (100k), IBM (120k) and Microsoft (500k) all offer credits to YC companies. More options will compel cloud providers to provide better service offerings to startups. I wonder to what extent YC companies default to AWS though. Based on what I've heard from acquaintances at Microsoft, I'm not sure they're getting the traction they'd like.

randomdrake 11y ago

> their customer success team offers excellent support Just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I did not find this to be case. I received terrible support, responses, and lack of responses from Digital Ocean to the point that I no longer use their services for anything serious. Here's one of the issues I experienced before I pulled the plug: I wanted to perform the simple task of creating an image from a backup and spinning it up into a server so I could have a duplicate dev server. Seemed very straightforward. Clicked a few buttons in their "dead simple" control panel. Their timer said "57 seconds remaining" but it never finished. I tried to contact support. 3.5 hours later I received a message saying that it could take hours to complete due to them: "zeroing out the storage space to be used in order to ensure previous data in those blocks are erased." I was further told that the advertised timer works for their images they have already setup, but everything else they couldn't give any ETA on. So, the timer was just eye candy not really attached to anything: "Unfortunately, this part of the process can take a while, especially for larger droplets or droplets based on backups or snapshots. Smaller droplets and those that are based on images we provide are generally faster and should finish creation within the advertised 55 seconds, as long as the system is not under high load. It's hard to give an accurate ETA for droplets of this size since there are many variables that go into the provisioning process, but note that the process could go up to three or so hours if there's high load at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience with this." I was attempting to recreate an image from a backup they did. It was of the smallest droplets they have available and it wasn't near capacity. The server never did actually get setup. Instead, just falling off of my "dead simple" dashboard every time, never hitting active. I mentioned this in the support ticket I had open, since the problem was obviously not resolved. Here was the response: "Glad to be of assistance. We appreciate you being a Digital Ocean customer and please let us know if we can be of further assistance!" This was the third person to respond on my ticket; a different person for every response. I left them and never looked back. You can find similar experiences on this website or by some brief Googling. Ultimately, DO is probably still fine to get things going or play around, but I wouldn't trust it for anything serious or anything where you would expect a timely or decent response to help you ensure you can get work done that day. I certainly wouldn't trust DO with anything even close to $250k worth of operations.

zacharybk 11y ago

caleblloyd 11y ago

Does the DO credit expire after one year? AWS and Google credits for >= $100K expire after one year. This really is a genius business move on any cloud provider's part. If you can get a startup to spend $100k of their free credit, they will have somewhere around an $8k monthly bill once they convert to a paying customer after the first year. It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money in the long run by developing efficient applications that likely won't come close to a $100k credit in the first year. This will also likely result in a much more scalable app and much less technical debt.

andrewsomething 11y ago
Yes. Similar to programs offered by other providers, this credit does expire after one year.
- tim333 11y ago
  Apparently Bizsparks lasts three years.
awinograd 11y ago
Yep--according to their TOS credits expire after one year unless stated otherwise. From https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/ https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/ 5.8 As of March 6, 2015, redemption of promotional credit is limited to 12 months from the date of issue (unless otherwise stated), at which time the credit will expire. Upon redemption, promotional credit expires after 12 months unless otherwise defined in the terms of the promotion. For instances where promotional credit was issued or redeemed prior to March 6, 2015, that credit will expire on March 6, 2016.

rjurney 11y ago

This website looks great, but feels like it is from a template. I want to know which template, if you don't mind? If it is original, well more power to you! Someone should make a template of your site :)

kbar13 11y ago
of posthaven?

rjurney 11y ago

pcote 11y ago

>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies. I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses. That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.

zanewill9 11y ago
This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few startups that were caught off-guard. AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.
toomanybeersies 11y ago
The company I work at spends a lot more money on staff than hosting. This is exactly people use Rails in startups, dev time is mminimised, at the cost of speed, and hence a requirement for more servers.

bmh_ca 11y ago

As a non-YC startup, I feel it quite unfair to be subsidizing other startups with our fees to DO. Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done. Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical. The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have been similarly slighted.

assocguilt 11y ago
Odd use of the word ecumenical.
- shoyer 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure the OP intended to write "economical" instead.
  - ossama 11y ago
    More likely "equitable"
  - geofft 11y ago
    No, I think "ecumenical" in the less common sense of the word, "worldwide or general in extent, influence, or application," makes perfect sense here. Or even in the usual sense of the word, if you're making an analogy between startup accelerators and Christian denominations. It's a pretty good analogy, since despite small differences in belief and large differences in culture and practice, everyone has roughly the same goals. A Lutheran might feel particularly slighted at a program that gives free choral music to Anglicans, because they sing all the same anthems and none of the differences are relevant, and so restricting the free stuff to Anglicans rubs in the difference for no good reason. This is quite different from the way a Buddhist or an atheist would feel slighted by not getting that free music. Given that OP claimed the feeling will pass, I don't think "economical" quite makes sense.
  - bmh_ca 11y ago
    Geoff's comment nails the intent.

mck- 11y ago

This is interesting, given that they are a Techstars company. I sure hope that they're going to up their credits for Techstars companies as well (currently at $10k, which is generous, but man.. $250k is 25x more!)

orliesaurus 11y ago

Is it 250K per team or globally?

ditonal 11y ago

Digital Ocean is really great for hobbyists and side project. I especially admire their community tutorials, which hosts tons of great content and I'm sure has been very valuable marketing for their products. With that said, I think trying to build a real startup on DO would be a big mistake. They simply don't offer the suite of products that the bigger cloud offerings do, and as clouds become more sophisticated, companies using them will have huge competitive advantages. From my perspective, tools like PaaS, Lambda, managed databases, big data/analytic tools etc are getting increasingly sophisticated. Using them now is a bit like a late 90s company using Python to code circles around companies sticking familiar, stable C++, where in this analogy C+ +is the equivalent to DO's basic VPS offerings that you use to cobble together what you need (stable and familiar, but ultimately less powerful and requires much more developer time to use effectively).

aprdm 11y ago
sorry can you be more explicit on what would be hard when scaling with DO? also, it's mainly just for your app hosting, right? You can use DO and RDS / Dynamo DB / Lambda etc...

tombrossman 11y ago

144 comments as I type this and I can't believe no one has mentioned OVH yet. I'm a happy customer of DigitalOcean, AWS, and OVH and my default choice for a while now has been OVH. DigitalOcean beats everyone in ease of use and UX, and AWS obviously has huge potential for scaling, but OVH consistently beats DigitalOcean in VPS performance and they include DDOS protection as standard. Test for yourself, fire up similarly sized VPSs at both DigitalOcean and OVH and benchmark them running identical tests. The DigitalOcean VPSs are pretty fast but the OVH ones consistently perform better for both CPU and disk speed. OVH supports startups just like the rest of the companies mentioned elsewhere in the thread too - see https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ for info. I have no affiliation with any of these companies except as a customer.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Interesting; I had never heard of OVH before. I currently have a bunch of stuff hosted on AWS and have been looking at digital ocean pricing; I'll add this to the list of places to check out. Thanks!
- joeyspn 11y ago
  OVH is well known here in Europe, they were the counterpart to USA's "The Planet" (merged with SoftLayer). If you wanted dedicated servers in the EU during the early 2000s, the preferred option was always OVH...
tajen 11y ago
OVH is a French group, submitted to the new Jan 2015 law about spying. Read this for more information: https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillance-law https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/a1766.ovh-stand-french-surveillan...
- kuschku 11y ago
  So, they have the same situation as DO, practically (where we can be sure that the NSA has some backdoor in the systems).

arrty88 11y ago

I'm sure this has been said already, but this is a pretty big slap in the face to startups not in a fancy incubator program, which probably already have everything else going for them. It's like giving a big check to someone who already won a full ride to a top university, no?

andreamazz 11y ago
I share your feeling. We are running our cloud platform on AWS, and it's hard to offer competitive prices when you are not founded and the AWS bills kick your ass. We are in an university incubator that gives us the office space (we pay a 'friendly' rent) and that's it. I realize it's a petty feeling, but...

sbose78 11y ago

If they are already a YC Startup, they are probably the ones who least need a $250k DO Credits.

goeric 11y ago

I think it's great that DO is offering this, but it's a little shocking they don't offer this to fellow Techstars alum. We only get $10K in credits, which is a stark contrast. We are loyal to Digital Ocean because it's a great service but also because it's family. We could have just as easily went AWS. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that it's a slight oversight and they'll bring this offer to their roots.

paulofilip3 11y ago

Good initiative. Wrong target. That's giving credit to those who need it less... I'm pretty sure, YC backed startups have plenty $$ for hosting.

paulofilip3 11y ago
Why not to all startups?? Like a proper startups program...

mrmondo 11y ago

Is there any ETA of when digital ocean will be available in Australia?