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I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway betwee

I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise. If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options. If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. How does DO get out of this spot? I want them to succeed and I will continue to support them as the big guys need the competition, but I fail to see how they compete against the likes of Amazon without undercutting significantly...and that won't bring profits. I think the margins on cloud infra is already pretty thin.

raiyu 7y ago
You hit the nail on the head, we are best for SMBs and teams that want to get things done quickly and don't need the hyperscale and added complexity of AWS. Our focus has always been on simplicity and as our customer needs and our own internal needs have grown we've added additional products to continue to allow customers to scale with us. We launched with just Droplets in 2012 and have since added block storage, Spaces object storage, load balancing, kubernetes, managed databases, firewalls, and more. Our goal isn't to be bigger than AWS or Google, but simply to provide a great service to our customers and to continue to expand our offering as those needs grow.
- neovive 7y ago
  Simplicity and reliability are the biggest reasons I've stayed with DO for so many years. The combination of droplets, spaces and simple load balancing is the sweet-spot for me. Not to mention a simple, consistent bill each month that makes budgeting much easier. Thanks DO and keep up the amazing work!
- sdotsen 7y ago
  yeah I'm not sure about your last paragraph. when I interviewed at DO, the few business folks I spoke to were adamant on taking on AWS. I kind of scoffed but hey I'm not running DO.
  - raiyu 7y ago
    "Business folks" :) But all kidding aside, the numbers just don't make sense. AWS is doing $30B in revenue and has tens of thousands of engineers. Google which many can argue has some of the best engineering on the planet is going after AWS investing billions in datacenters and again using thousands of engineers. So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up. Certainly when you have 500+ people in a company everyone has different opinions and view points on where a company should be headed, or who it is competing with and so forth, but for me the priority has always been clear. Focus on the SMBs, and developer teams, that need the flexibility that AWS offers without the complexity because you aren't managing a $10MM hosting budget.
    - cj 7y ago
      I don’t necessarily disagree with you, not sure I’d place a bet on DO taking on AWS realistically, but: > So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up. Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success It’s more a matter of taking on the market from a slightly different angle. One viable path I see is for DO to ramp up their enterprise appeal by offering services on par with AWS, while cutting down the operational complexity of managing AWS services (using AWS = incredibly high overhead with configuration and everything else).
      - muse900 7y ago
        > Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success I'll agree on that. I won't agree with the rest though, I don't think DO can compete in an enterprise level. Actually in the longrun I don't see DO ever being viable. AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes and they are going to take over that margin that is left on services like DO, ovh etc. I think the only viable business plan for them right now would be to focus on their simplicity and continue building on it hoping they will get bought out by the big players. Obviously thats not good for us -> amazon and google owning everything on the web but unless there is some crazy law that limits them from doing so, they are going to do it.
- dkersten 7y ago
  What I really wish for is a simple way of running docker containers (like AWS Fargate, or at least ECS), because I want to run docker containers across multiple droplets, but I don't want the full complexity of Kubernetes. Also something akin to auto-scaling groups. If DO had those, I'd use it a whole lot more than I do (currently I only spend use approx. $140/month on DO).
  - mattste 7y ago
    I just led a migration for my small team from Zeit Now to Render (https://render.com/ https://render.com/). It has filled this need pretty well. There are some features that I wish existed but overall the simplicity has been great for our use case. They do not have auto-scaling but it's planned (https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling).
    - anurag 7y ago
      (Render founder) Glad to hear it, and I hope you've posted your feature requests on https://feedback.render.com https://feedback.render.com. We're investing heavily in growing the team and putting a strong engineering foundation in place so we can keep adding new features quickly and reliably.
    - Kkoala 7y ago
      How is Render different from Heroku? It seems like a slightly more expensive than Heroku with slightly fewer features?
      - anurag 7y ago
        Render is more flexible than Heroku: you can host apps that rely on disks (like Elasticsearch and MySQL), private services, cron jobs, and of course free static sites. You also get automatic zero downtime deploys, health checks and small but handy features like HTTP/2 and automatic HTTP->HTTPS redirects. It's considerably less expensive as your application scales: a webapp that needs 3GB RAM costs $50/month on Render; on Heroku you'll pay $250/month for 2.5GB RAM, and $500/month for the next tier (14GB RAM). And you get free chat support.
- sdesol 7y ago
  On a somewhat related note, what is the best way for startups to work with DO to get free cloud computing? My product is a search and analytics engine for github and I would like to offer a free version for people to use and I would like them to use DO since I find it has the best bang for the buck. I can see people that would like to use my solution to not need the bells and whistles of aws, azure, etc. Does DO provide startup assistance like Microsoft, which gives free cloud computing? My goal would be to say something like try DO free for a week and if you like it, continue using them.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    DO used to have referral credits. A $5 of referral credit could feed a $20 instance for a week, of the smallest instance for a month.
  - raiyu 7y ago
    Check out our Hatch program - that's probably what you are looking for: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/
- nailer 7y ago
  Where's your serverless product? I don't want to manage Kubernetes any more than I want to manage instances.
  - izolate 7y ago
    I agree. I’d like to use DO but I’m full in on serverless and GCP keeps me on their platform with Cloud Functions and now Cloud Run.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  I do love the simplicity, but I think the big thing that is missing is private networking. I'd love to be able to build my own network that connects droplets together and assign them IPs, and that would let me setup VPNs between datacenter. Also, adding at least another US datacenter would be great.
- daywednes 7y ago
  @raiyu Any more insight about this debt-raise round? Why didn’t DO raise from a VC and increase their valuation to the next level?
- kokey 7y ago
  I've always believed that as cloud stacks mature and get commoditised various VPS providers will provide a decent alternative to being locked into the AWS or Azure ecosystem. I think the main drivers for people actually migrating will be cost and flexibility, where flexibility will be provided by software stacks that will be deployed on top of simple compute instances.
avhception 7y ago
I guess there is a niche, not every enterprise spends millions a year. We're a pretty happy customer that spends maybe a few thousands every month, if there are enough of us it could already be a sustainable business?
- gramakri 7y ago
  Aren't enterprises that spend millions a year the niche and not the other way around ?
numbers 7y ago
I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.
- luladjiev 7y ago
  Check scaleway and hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
- tmpz22 7y ago
  Pretty sure Linode is comparable price wise and in Europe there are cheaper options like OVH. Digital Ocean pricing becomes pretty comparable with GCP and others when you start specing up to a "production-grade" server i.e. the kind of server you actually want to run Postgres on. Their K8s offering I think is the cheapest of all major providers but you lose out of secondary benefits like GKE's fantastic log analysis tools (I think its called stackdriver or something). Their database offerings are in about the same range as other providers (not comparing it to Google Cloud $panner).
  - lwb 7y ago
    Just popping in to say that OVH is the cheapest option for a reason -- support/monitoring/any other features you might want are just not there like they might be on other providers. I host a single tiny website on OVH and they restart it randomly every ~4 months without warning (seriously). It was annoying at first until I set our services to run on system boot. Some more discussion at discourse.org that's relevant: https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-ovh/41180 https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-o...
    - the8472 7y ago
      > until I set our services to run on system boot. Which pretty much is how things were always done, even in the PHP-CGI days.
jdance 7y ago
I'm a customer on DO as a small business (mobile game). I wanted some linux servers that I have control over, and I wanted a managed database where someone does backups for me. I also wanted simplicity and a nice UI. I didn't even compare prices, I just thought it was a good deal and didn't look back. At first I tried Heroku but it was too much adapting our application to their way of doing things. DO is just hyper-simple for me. So, thanks DO :)
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Heroku was really built for Web Apps (especially Rails)
  - YourMatt 7y ago
    Aren't they just a middleman for AWS anyway?
    - hnzix 7y ago
      AWS is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). You need to worry about load balancers, backup scripts, firewalls etc. Ie you need a plausible sysadmin to run it. Even Elastic Beanstalk requires some sysadmin. Heroku is platform as a service (PaaS). It abstracts away the complexity of AWS. The base cost is more expensive than raw AWS but you don't need to source and pay for a sysadmin. AWS, Heroku and DO aren't "better" than each other, they serve different use cases.
      - serverQuestion 7y ago
        I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such. With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.
        slig 7y ago
        Have you tried Dokku?
toohotatopic 7y ago
>How does DO get out of this spot? What if they package the available open source versions of AWS and GCP services and allow people to move off amazon and google? Have DO as one region and at first sell it as a backup. Then, make it enticing for people to scale it up so that they shift some work over. DO could become the place where people can run infrastructure that mixes AWS and GCP. After some acquisitions, companies will have services in both worlds. Why not unite them in one place?
Tecuane 7y ago
DO's branding and a lot of their offering is pretty good, but their locations for non-US customers are much worse than many of their competitors. For instance (and a particular point for me), they still don't have any presence in Australia after over half a decade of it being marked as "under review" on their customer feedback page. Having geographical locations to back up the quality of the offering is a step forward IMO.
- mkj 7y ago
  Most likely Telstra (40% market share telco) charge too much for peering network traffic in Australia? Same as how Google Cloud free tier excludes only China and Australia.
  - kiwijamo 7y ago
    Vultr has a POP in Sydney and seem to manage just fine, offering plans similar to DO. I like DO but as I'm based in New Zealand, it's a no brainer to go with Vultr due to their Sydney POP.
mr_toad 7y ago
> If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra They do more than just VPNs. They do object storage, containers and K8. They have command line an API based tooling. A small enterprise could do a lot with that. If you were talking a $100 million dollar budget and you needed bells and whistles like IAM Lambda or Glacier I could agree.
mercer 7y ago
In my case I found it beneficial to just move everything to Hetzner. It offered everything I need at a lower price, and I foresee that for some of my projects I'll need to get 'proper' servers instead of the lowest-tier VPS offerings. It's easier to do that when it's all in the same ecosystem. That said, it's only been barely worth the hassle. The difference in cost for the lowest tier, at least, is almost a rounding error in my finances. Furthermore, it feels strange that I still often end up at DO pages for various tutorials or articles to help me set things up. I guess mostly I still find myself fond of DO, have been helped immensely by their free articles and tutorials, and am immensely impressed that they haven't gone to shit like all the shared hosting providers I've churned through in the years before I moved to DO. and while it was ultimately worth it for me to move all my projects to Hetzner, I wouldn't particularly recommend that approach to anyone unless <10$ a month is something they are concerned about.

raiyu 7y ago

You hit the nail on the head, we are best for SMBs and teams that want to get things done quickly and don't need the hyperscale and added complexity of AWS. Our focus has always been on simplicity and as our customer needs and our own internal needs have grown we've added additional products to continue to allow customers to scale with us. We launched with just Droplets in 2012 and have since added block storage, Spaces object storage, load balancing, kubernetes, managed databases, firewalls, and more. Our goal isn't to be bigger than AWS or Google, but simply to provide a great service to our customers and to continue to expand our offering as those needs grow.

neovive 7y ago
Simplicity and reliability are the biggest reasons I've stayed with DO for so many years. The combination of droplets, spaces and simple load balancing is the sweet-spot for me. Not to mention a simple, consistent bill each month that makes budgeting much easier. Thanks DO and keep up the amazing work!
sdotsen 7y ago
yeah I'm not sure about your last paragraph. when I interviewed at DO, the few business folks I spoke to were adamant on taking on AWS. I kind of scoffed but hey I'm not running DO.
- raiyu 7y ago
  "Business folks" :) But all kidding aside, the numbers just don't make sense. AWS is doing $30B in revenue and has tens of thousands of engineers. Google which many can argue has some of the best engineering on the planet is going after AWS investing billions in datacenters and again using thousands of engineers. So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up. Certainly when you have 500+ people in a company everyone has different opinions and view points on where a company should be headed, or who it is competing with and so forth, but for me the priority has always been clear. Focus on the SMBs, and developer teams, that need the flexibility that AWS offers without the complexity because you aren't managing a $10MM hosting budget.
  - cj 7y ago
    I don’t necessarily disagree with you, not sure I’d place a bet on DO taking on AWS realistically, but: > So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up. Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success It’s more a matter of taking on the market from a slightly different angle. One viable path I see is for DO to ramp up their enterprise appeal by offering services on par with AWS, while cutting down the operational complexity of managing AWS services (using AWS = incredibly high overhead with configuration and everything else).
    - muse900 7y ago
      > Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success I'll agree on that. I won't agree with the rest though, I don't think DO can compete in an enterprise level. Actually in the longrun I don't see DO ever being viable. AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes and they are going to take over that margin that is left on services like DO, ovh etc. I think the only viable business plan for them right now would be to focus on their simplicity and continue building on it hoping they will get bought out by the big players. Obviously thats not good for us -> amazon and google owning everything on the web but unless there is some crazy law that limits them from doing so, they are going to do it.
dkersten 7y ago
What I really wish for is a simple way of running docker containers (like AWS Fargate, or at least ECS), because I want to run docker containers across multiple droplets, but I don't want the full complexity of Kubernetes. Also something akin to auto-scaling groups. If DO had those, I'd use it a whole lot more than I do (currently I only spend use approx. $140/month on DO).
- mattste 7y ago
  I just led a migration for my small team from Zeit Now to Render (https://render.com/ https://render.com/). It has filled this need pretty well. There are some features that I wish existed but overall the simplicity has been great for our use case. They do not have auto-scaling but it's planned (https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling).
  - anurag 7y ago
    (Render founder) Glad to hear it, and I hope you've posted your feature requests on https://feedback.render.com https://feedback.render.com. We're investing heavily in growing the team and putting a strong engineering foundation in place so we can keep adding new features quickly and reliably.
  - Kkoala 7y ago
    How is Render different from Heroku? It seems like a slightly more expensive than Heroku with slightly fewer features?
    - anurag 7y ago
      Render is more flexible than Heroku: you can host apps that rely on disks (like Elasticsearch and MySQL), private services, cron jobs, and of course free static sites. You also get automatic zero downtime deploys, health checks and small but handy features like HTTP/2 and automatic HTTP->HTTPS redirects. It's considerably less expensive as your application scales: a webapp that needs 3GB RAM costs $50/month on Render; on Heroku you'll pay $250/month for 2.5GB RAM, and $500/month for the next tier (14GB RAM). And you get free chat support.
sdesol 7y ago
On a somewhat related note, what is the best way for startups to work with DO to get free cloud computing? My product is a search and analytics engine for github and I would like to offer a free version for people to use and I would like them to use DO since I find it has the best bang for the buck. I can see people that would like to use my solution to not need the bells and whistles of aws, azure, etc. Does DO provide startup assistance like Microsoft, which gives free cloud computing? My goal would be to say something like try DO free for a week and if you like it, continue using them.
- nine_k 7y ago
  DO used to have referral credits. A $5 of referral credit could feed a $20 instance for a week, of the smallest instance for a month.
- raiyu 7y ago
  Check out our Hatch program - that's probably what you are looking for: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/
nailer 7y ago
Where's your serverless product? I don't want to manage Kubernetes any more than I want to manage instances.
- izolate 7y ago
  I agree. I’d like to use DO but I’m full in on serverless and GCP keeps me on their platform with Cloud Functions and now Cloud Run.
apple4ever 7y ago
I do love the simplicity, but I think the big thing that is missing is private networking. I'd love to be able to build my own network that connects droplets together and assign them IPs, and that would let me setup VPNs between datacenter. Also, adding at least another US datacenter would be great.
daywednes 7y ago
@raiyu Any more insight about this debt-raise round? Why didn’t DO raise from a VC and increase their valuation to the next level?
kokey 7y ago
I've always believed that as cloud stacks mature and get commoditised various VPS providers will provide a decent alternative to being locked into the AWS or Azure ecosystem. I think the main drivers for people actually migrating will be cost and flexibility, where flexibility will be provided by software stacks that will be deployed on top of simple compute instances.

avhception 7y ago

I guess there is a niche, not every enterprise spends millions a year. We're a pretty happy customer that spends maybe a few thousands every month, if there are enough of us it could already be a sustainable business?

gramakri 7y ago
Aren't enterprises that spend millions a year the niche and not the other way around ?

numbers 7y ago

I thought their $5/mo machines are the cheapest on the internet for the specs available. Are there cheaper options? I’m hosting a low traffic page that gets maybe 500-1000 views a month and even at $5/mo it seems overkill IMO.

luladjiev 7y ago
Check scaleway and hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
tmpz22 7y ago
Pretty sure Linode is comparable price wise and in Europe there are cheaper options like OVH. Digital Ocean pricing becomes pretty comparable with GCP and others when you start specing up to a "production-grade" server i.e. the kind of server you actually want to run Postgres on. Their K8s offering I think is the cheapest of all major providers but you lose out of secondary benefits like GKE's fantastic log analysis tools (I think its called stackdriver or something). Their database offerings are in about the same range as other providers (not comparing it to Google Cloud $panner).
- lwb 7y ago
  Just popping in to say that OVH is the cheapest option for a reason -- support/monitoring/any other features you might want are just not there like they might be on other providers. I host a single tiny website on OVH and they restart it randomly every ~4 months without warning (seriously). It was annoying at first until I set our services to run on system boot. Some more discussion at discourse.org that's relevant: https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-ovh/41180 https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-o...
  - the8472 7y ago
    > until I set our services to run on system boot. Which pretty much is how things were always done, even in the PHP-CGI days.

jdance 7y ago

I'm a customer on DO as a small business (mobile game). I wanted some linux servers that I have control over, and I wanted a managed database where someone does backups for me. I also wanted simplicity and a nice UI. I didn't even compare prices, I just thought it was a good deal and didn't look back. At first I tried Heroku but it was too much adapting our application to their way of doing things. DO is just hyper-simple for me. So, thanks DO :)

WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
Heroku was really built for Web Apps (especially Rails)
- YourMatt 7y ago
  Aren't they just a middleman for AWS anyway?
  - hnzix 7y ago
    AWS is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). You need to worry about load balancers, backup scripts, firewalls etc. Ie you need a plausible sysadmin to run it. Even Elastic Beanstalk requires some sysadmin. Heroku is platform as a service (PaaS). It abstracts away the complexity of AWS. The base cost is more expensive than raw AWS but you don't need to source and pay for a sysadmin. AWS, Heroku and DO aren't "better" than each other, they serve different use cases.
    - serverQuestion 7y ago
      I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such. With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.
      - slig 7y ago
        Have you tried Dokku?

toohotatopic 7y ago

>How does DO get out of this spot? What if they package the available open source versions of AWS and GCP services and allow people to move off amazon and google? Have DO as one region and at first sell it as a backup. Then, make it enticing for people to scale it up so that they shift some work over. DO could become the place where people can run infrastructure that mixes AWS and GCP. After some acquisitions, companies will have services in both worlds. Why not unite them in one place?

Tecuane 7y ago

DO's branding and a lot of their offering is pretty good, but their locations for non-US customers are much worse than many of their competitors. For instance (and a particular point for me), they still don't have any presence in Australia after over half a decade of it being marked as "under review" on their customer feedback page. Having geographical locations to back up the quality of the offering is a step forward IMO.

mkj 7y ago
Most likely Telstra (40% market share telco) charge too much for peering network traffic in Australia? Same as how Google Cloud free tier excludes only China and Australia.
- kiwijamo 7y ago
  Vultr has a POP in Sydney and seem to manage just fine, offering plans similar to DO. I like DO but as I'm based in New Zealand, it's a no brainer to go with Vultr due to their Sydney POP.

mr_toad 7y ago

> If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra They do more than just VPNs. They do object storage, containers and K8. They have command line an API based tooling. A small enterprise could do a lot with that. If you were talking a $100 million dollar budget and you needed bells and whistles like IAM Lambda or Glacier I could agree.

mercer 7y ago

In my case I found it beneficial to just move everything to Hetzner. It offered everything I need at a lower price, and I foresee that for some of my projects I'll need to get 'proper' servers instead of the lowest-tier VPS offerings. It's easier to do that when it's all in the same ecosystem. That said, it's only been barely worth the hassle. The difference in cost for the lowest tier, at least, is almost a rounding error in my finances. Furthermore, it feels strange that I still often end up at DO pages for various tutorials or articles to help me set things up. I guess mostly I still find myself fond of DO, have been helped immensely by their free articles and tutorials, and am immensely impressed that they haven't gone to shit like all the shared hosting providers I've churned through in the years before I moved to DO. and while it was ultimately worth it for me to move all my projects to Hetzner, I wouldn't particularly recommend that approach to anyone unless <10$ a month is something they are concerned about.