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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

by 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.
      - jonahbenton 7y ago
        There are still MANY old style ISPs playing in the DO-like space. Hosting is HUGE. Plenty of room for many DO like players at .1-1% marketshare. Google and AWS are NOT going to become simpler, to the contrary, that would defeat their entire proposition. To eliminate the traditional enterprise data center entirely, build sufficient lock-in moats, and then continue to innovate around costs and value requires tons of bespoke capabilities and complexities.
      - apple4ever 7y ago
        > AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes Really? I see them becoming more complex as they add more services.
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.

by raiyu 7y ago

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.
    - jonahbenton 7y ago
      There are still MANY old style ISPs playing in the DO-like space. Hosting is HUGE. Plenty of room for many DO like players at .1-1% marketshare. Google and AWS are NOT going to become simpler, to the contrary, that would defeat their entire proposition. To eliminate the traditional enterprise data center entirely, build sufficient lock-in moats, and then continue to innovate around costs and value requires tons of bespoke capabilities and complexities.
    - apple4ever 7y ago
      > AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes Really? I see them becoming more complex as they add more services.

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.