29 ms·

DigitalOcean S-1

924 points by marc__1 6y ago

jimmyed 6y ago
One would imagine they'd make their APIs resilient before this?
unixhero 6y ago
Fantastic company.
rvz 6y ago
That sounds like a buy signal. I like this stock.
- unixhero 6y ago
  Well it is not listed just yet! What is it a buy signal for?
  - jnwatson 6y ago
    That you can buy it at all is a buy signal. This is a sure sign of too much money chasing too few opportunities.
neom 6y ago
Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days, lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think everyone involved knew this day would come. Personally I'm really proud of the work we did, and I'm overjoyed to have been part of building a business that is going to be a public company. Thanks to the HN community for being so supportive over the years.
- yte14 6y ago
  The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker’s fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said product in its wake.
  - neom 6y ago
    Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about. DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.
      - codegeek 6y ago
        I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times, it has been a horrendous experience.
        bombcar 6y ago
        They make you call support to delete a “cloud server” - glad I’ll only have to do that once more.
yannoninator 6y ago
What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.
- nowherebeen 6y ago
  I think it mostly comes down to price (at least for me). They will always have to be cheaper than big cloud providers to stay competitive.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  The point is that they aren't GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't want to give more money to Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.
  - nunodonato 6y ago
    This. Some of us are actually disgusted with amazon and prefer not to do business with it. Yes, even AWS
- leesalminen 6y ago
  While I wouldn’t use DO et. al. for my production environment (it’s on AWS), I’ve got a handful of ancillary services that don’t need the complexity of AWS. They’re so small and inconsequential to the business that I don’t want to spend any time thinking about the security risk of keeping them anywhere near production. They don’t need access to prod data so why put them in a position where they could potentially allow access to it? So, for me, the easiest thing was to be put them with a completely different company. Don’t have to worry about any potential issues with imitating it on AWS (via additional accounts, different region, etc) which are all prone to human failure over time. Maybe I’ve a bad reason, but it works for me and DO gets ~$50/mo from us and I’ve never considered switching.
- 6y ago
dukeofdoom 6y ago
So how does one buy ipo shares? One of my resolutions for this year was to buy shares in companies I do business with.
- sithlord 6y ago
  Be a giant investor, ie a bank. IPOs are there for banks to be able to buy up shares at a low price, then dump it when retail investors get their turn to run it up before banks sell off.
  - cat199 6y ago
    another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain access to more wealth: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins/updated-3 https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... 200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).
    - milkshakes 6y ago
      being an accredited investor doesn’t magically get you IPO shares. they are very scarce and almost completely allocated to high volume institutions (you might get lucky if you have a very large relationship with one such institution but that’s harder and harder these days)
    - csmiller 6y ago
      I think you can just take the Series 65 and be good to go these days
    - eklavya 6y ago
      Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before they can sell it in the market.
      - 6y ago
fersarr 6y ago
So simple and nice to use
gizmo 6y ago
Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of premium we've seen from other tech IPOs. A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in only 357m in rev. That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too low.
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  > That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too low. I vaguely remember a talk I had with an employee there was a time when I think the average user was paying only $20/mo, which at the time, I had a $250-500/mo bill depending on load. This was before they even had a load balancer product (so 2012-2013-ish?), and I was running a fairly unsuccessful managed WordPress offering that had dynamic scaling based on the reported metrics. The infrastructure was just a big server for MySql, and a tiny server for the orchestrator. Then it would use the DO API to spin up new servers off a snapshot, ssh into them, and run the setup script to point to the right Wordpress instance in the database, then add it to the nginx reverse proxy list for the domain. The whole thing could scale up or down in 30 seconds. Sure it isn't as fast as AWS or Azure could scale, but we were in control, in code, before containerizing was even really a thing.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  I wonder what the distribution of revenue per customer looks like. I bet (hope?) that at the low end there are a lot of consumers who set up a $5 droplet to tinker around for a few months without doing much more, and that the revenue figures are propped up by a small group of bigger customers spending much more.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    I also think this distribution would be fascinating.
- Thaxll 6y ago
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes Control Plane scaling is obfuscated. I had to contact support to realize that the control plane nodes are somehow tied to the size of your node pool when you create the cluster? That's not documented anywhere and was the cause of many control plane timeouts. 4. No ALIAS dns record, no way to serve Spaces from an apex domain. (I know this is a vendor specific implementation but it's table stakes imo) Again, I'm a (mostly) happy DO customer and wish them the best but if they really want to be seen on the same level as AWS or GCP in terms of some parity, they need to include some of these QoL features.
- staticautomatic 6y ago
  They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    They really do. And it goes in tangents and details I wouldn't have expected. Their support is great.
  - skrtskrt 6y ago
    As I started learning how to spin up and manage Linux servers and then deploy my own (unmanaged) k8s on them, half of my bookmarks are DO documentation.
  - bredren 6y ago
    Content growth done right.
  - sdfhbdf 6y ago
    Yep great SEO Strategy and raising Brand awarness. Win-win for people searching. Find out about how to install nginx on Ubuntu and then memorize that next time you need a VM you go that blue website with great tutorials.
ArtWomb 6y ago
Would be interesting to see App Platform growth numbers. Lot's of competition: Heroku, Netlify, Fly.io, App Engine, Cloud Run, etc. But they may have hit the sweet spot in terms of features and pricing.
- mauflows 6y ago
  The missing feature for me is more cache control. It's behind cloudflare but not configurable. So you can't cache json for instance
  - arcticfox 6y ago
    For me, the missing feature is ability to access private networks. (Noting here, for the DO product manager reviewing the thread..!)
    - phildougherty 6y ago
      Aware of this pain. Feedback noted :)
    - Tostino 6y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? Just wondering what you mean because I have been using private networks and haven't really run into many issues.
      - arcticfox 6y ago
        I don't think you can access them from the new App Platform, if I'm not mistaken. We use them heavily from regular Droplets, Kubernetes etc.
Graffur 6y ago
There's already a lot of positive comments in here but I'll throw in another one. Tried DO out recently and I like how it set up. I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I agree generally, but Lightsail is just obvious hot garbage. The CPU throttling is crazy aggressive, and you'll see it after 30 minutes of use, for all but the 2 most expensive of the 7 total plans. I don't see how they could be maintaining a decent customer base with that setup, but I guess marketing is powerful.
  - sombremesa 6y ago
    I use Lightsail mostly to dodge Route 53 fees, since it comes with DNS management and I have a lot of hosted zones. However I'm also not a business and couldn't care less about the CPU throttling.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      That's interesting. I wonder if anyone has made some sort of api shim/facade to automate that route 53 avoidance.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example. Nope, the biggest competition is in the same niche - Linode, OVH, Scaleway.
  - Graffur 6y ago
    Is that what you think?
cube00 6y ago
They lost me after I couldn't switch from CentOS unless I also agreed to lose my IP address. Reached out to support and got the unhelpful reply of "use another OS version within the CentOS family" which didn't really help considering CentOS was charging its direction.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  You lost me there, their CentOS products are in a separate area then the rest of the OS's? Couldn't you just reformat with what ever OS you want?
  - cube00 6y ago
    "You can use any image in your account that runs an OS that is in the same family as the Droplet you're rebuilding" https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/ I thought support could help me out given the CentOS situation and it being a special case but they weren't even aware of what was happening or that users would need to move off despite my explanation in the ticket. Hopefully it's better now it's more widely known.
    - riffic 6y ago
      > runs an OS that is in the same family as the Droplet you're rebuilding This line in the documentation might be misleading. Unless you have a very old legacy droplet that uses HV-assigned kernels, you should be able to reimage your droplet and use another OS.
- covidthrow 6y ago
  They have "floating IP addresses" as droplet-agnostic IPs for exactly this purpose.
  - cube00 6y ago
    A floating IP address couldn't be used in my case because I needed a reverse DNS entry and "Floating IPs do not support PTR (rDNS) records." Along with other limitations such as "we do not support IPv6 floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4" and "floating IPs do not support SMTP traffic" https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/
daywednes 6y ago
what's their IPO valuation?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
breck 6y ago
Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean customer: . Those are the ones just off the top of my head. Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the past near decade. Excited to see they are financially very healthy.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  The only issue I've ever had is the login auth email can take 20 minutes to arrive at fastmail. This seems to have gotten better lately. What a great service!!
- treesknees 6y ago
  I ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at the time didn't have hourly rates. I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable hosting provider.
  - cube00 6y ago
    It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and block the lot. I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a model like other providers have where you need to request permission to send mail from support. A selection over two years: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-digital-ocean-actually-prevent-abuse-via-spam-email https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-d... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-spam-digital-ocean https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-sp... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious-does-digital-ocean-take-abuse-reports https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious...
babayega2 6y ago
Thank you DO for offering hosting for us in Africa who need a reliable hosting and fixed rates for the services so that we can plan ahead. Also the tutorials are a must have! Like today I used Django and DO Space and everything was smooth.
nickjj 6y ago
I've been using DO for around 6-7 years now. Really happy with the services overall. I hope nothing changes after IPO'ing. The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around for folks using Spaces. I'm looking forward to the day where Spaces is as good as S3 because DO's offering of Spaces includes not only an object store but a free CDN on top. Seems like a good deal for $5 bucks a month if it were dependable. It's weird because every other service I use by DO has been top notch.
- wakatime 6y ago
  Yep, same experience with Spaces here. That's why we use Spaces for backups only, since it's very affordable and backups don't need millisecond latency. https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-vs-aws-s3 https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...
api 6y ago
I find this really exciting, since DO has one of the only managed PGSQL + K8S combos that seems like it could compete with Google and AWS. Always nice to have more competition in this space. With IPO funding they can probably really compete. They'll probably have their own data centers soon.
acremades 6y ago
Here is the podcast episode where Ben and Moisey Uretsky share how they built DigitalOcean. Worth a listen. https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-humble-beginnings-these-two-russian-brothers-built-a-billion-dollar-business-in-america/ https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-hu...
aj_nikhil 6y ago
DO is a dream company. Build something like this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hu3 6y ago
edit: if you're going to downvote at least let me know why. I hold HN on high standards. DO is a fantastic value proposition. Reminds me when I was gathering cryptocurrency prices from exchanges and needed the lowest delay possible so an algorithm could protect me from pump-and-dumps. In my testings, a $5/month machine from Digital Ocean was the fastest to fetch prices from Bittrex. I got prices within 0.2 milliseconds (yes, under 1 millisecond). It was unbeliavable. The algo failed miserably ofc. Mostly because Exchanges price API tend to be unstable. Often giving stale or no data.
jtdev 6y ago
I was really considering moving from AWS to DO until I noticed this: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse So anyone who's offended by content you might host on DO can report your site and some identity politics obsessed bureauocrat decides if you're cancelled or not...? The public cloud has turned into an Orwellian nightmare.
- 1f60c 6y ago
  From your link: > Report abuse: > > - DMCA Takedown > - Trademark Infringement > - Spam > - Phishing > - Malware > - Botnet > - Intrusion/exploit attempts (Bruteforce, Scans etc) > - Child Abuse > - Violent Threats and Harassment > - Other That seems like a reasonable list of stuff I wouldn't want to have my platform be used for, either. Though, one might reasonably take issue with that "Other" category, but note that--at least in the US--web hosts cannot be forced to host any content they don't want to.
  - jtdev 6y ago
    I think you’re downplaying the “Other” category, which literally gives DO carte blanche in cancelling those they don’t approve of, or worse who the mob pressures DO to cancel. Do you not see how problematic this is? I agree with all of the other categories wholeheartedly, but even then, application of the policies of these organizations should be uniform, i.e., if both right wing and left wing websites publishes “Violent Threats and Harrassment”, both should be taken down. That’s not what we’re seeing in practice from the major cloud providers.
    - 1f60c 6y ago
      > Do you not see how problematic this is? Their platform, their rules.
      - jtdev 6y ago
        “Their platform” has become the public square. If you think allowing unfettered control of such a utility by a small number of mega corporations - with political biases that change to suit their bottom line - is a good thing then I’m not sure we’re on the same page, in the same book, on the same planet.
stephenSinniah 6y ago
From the risk factors summary: Implications of Being an Emerging Growth Company We are an “emerging growth company” as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. We may take advantage of certain exemptions from various public company reporting requirements, including not being required to have our internal controls over financial reporting audited by our independent registered public accounting firm under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements and exemptions from the requirements of holding a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier. In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an “emerging growth company” can delay adopting new or revised accounting standards until those standards apply to private companies. We have elected to take advantage of certain of the reduced disclosure obligations in the registration statement of which this prospectus is a part and may elect to take advantage of other reduced reporting requirements in future filings. As a result, the information that we provide to our stockholders may be different than you might receive from other public reporting companies in which you hold equity interests. Wow, I didn't know about this. Shouldn't financial reporting always be transparent?
- paws 6y ago
  Huh, that's a bit surprising. Can anyone point to examples of what kinds of disclosure obligations are reduced? e.g. liquidation multipliers?
- gen220 6y ago
  From your snippet: > We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier. The definition of "emerging growth company", from https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC > A company qualifies as an emerging growth company if it has total annual gross revenues of less than $1.07 billion during its most recently completed fiscal year and, as of December 8, 2011, had not sold common equity securities under a registration statement. A company continues to be an emerging growth company for the first five fiscal years after it completes an IPO, unless one of the following occurs: > - its total annual gross revenues are $1.07 billion or more > - it has issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt in the past three years or > - it becomes a “large accelerated filer,” as defined in Exchange Act Rule 12b-2 2020's gross revenue was 318m growing at 50-60m yoy from prior years. So, unless that growth is somehow compounding, the 5 years post-IPO is the most likely outcome. The biggest implications are relaxed requirements around explaining executive compensation, and that financial control auditing (SOX-compliance) is not required. It's not necessarily a bad thing for investors, but a trade-off. It means the company can focus more on growth and less elsewhere.
f430 6y ago
when will DigitalOCean IPO?
erwinh 6y ago
been a fan of DigitalOcean for years. Somehow they were able to bring a focus on usability to cloud offerings like no other provider could. Most recent thing that made my life 100x easier is their Apps platform with direct Github integrations for deployment of react apps removing any need to learn CI/CD stuff which I dont want to waste time on in early alpha startup phase :)
ivraatiems 6y ago
I might have mentioned this before, but DigitalOcean's support is (or was, before I stopped being their customer) absolutely abysmal. I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.) So I tried another browser, another computer, etc. The change never took. Finally, I contacted their support. It took a ton of back and forth with people who had dubious language comprehension before I finally convinced them anything other than user error was going on... but then, instead of fixing it, they demanded I take a video and upload it for them to prove it was real! I did, and I paid the invoice manually. The bug was eventually fixed after a month or two, but it was a pain until that happened. I found another provider who is cheaper for the resources I need and has better customer service by miles. If I can't get you to even take my money in an easy and reliable way, I can't trust you to operate anything I rely on.
- oliverjudge 6y ago
  Out of curiosity where did you move to?
  - ivraatiems 6y ago
    I moved to BuyVM, https://buyvm.net/ https://buyvm.net/. I had already been using their services for a few years, I just expanded on what I already had. They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal. I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be represented in their behavior towards customers or who they choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel differently.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      Not treating people differently based on their beliefs sounds like someone with leanings on either side, rather than extremists on either side.
dartf 6y ago
I really want to love DO, but I just can't. 2 main pain points I had from working with it for ~3 month: 1. Spaces keys. There is no way to fine tune access rights. Anyone with spaces key can access any space in the organization and read/write to it. I trust people I work with, but there is always room for a mistake, so even a small chance that someone can accidentally nuke our production space makes me nervous. 2. Something from yesterday: we use new DO apps to deploy a static web app. Yesterday I started to get random 404s for some of the assets, so app become unusable. My colleague in Argentina had same issues, but for different assets. We are lucky that it was a staging app, but imagine it was a production app and that would happen over the weekend? How do you even detect that? Run uptime monitor form dozen different locations?
- Sebguer 6y ago
  Completely unrelated to DO, but for 2, yes? You should absolutely do something like that if an app needs to be accessible worldwide. There are many reasons an app might become unavailable for different parts of the world, especially if you're reliant on a CDN since POPs can fail or become unavailable in weird and silent ways. Something like Thousandeyes is good for this.
pjfin123 6y ago
Please add GPUs! Google cloud and AWS's interfaces are hard to use. I recently discovered vast.ai which is great but cheap DO GPUs would be more trusted/professional (even if they only had one option).
- trsohmers 6y ago
  (Shameless self promotion): Check out Lambda's GPU cloud: https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud
  - lvs 6y ago
    Are you planning to have an option that is CPU heavy with 1xGPU for CPU-bound loads? Like a g4ad, g4dn type of configuration?
emgo 6y ago
The biggest threat to DigitalOcean is that AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips. Over times they'll be able to get hardware for cheaper, and also more specialized hardware that uses less power. DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft, essentially giving money to their competition. If DigitalOcean doesn't get into semiconductors quickly, the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider as a low-cost branch, like airlines do.
- natchy 6y ago
  > the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider Or acquired by a chip maker, like Intel.
- libria 6y ago
  > AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips What are the GCP and Azure equivalents of AWS Nitro?
  - roland35 6y ago
    Here is an article about Azure at least: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-processors-chips-servers-surface-report https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-p... “Because silicon is a foundational building block for technology, we’re continuing to invest in our own capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing and tools, while also fostering and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip providers,” says Microsoft’s communications chief Frank Shaw.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    For GCP, it depends. GCP doesn't have a Nitro competitor, but they offer Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are more of a competitor to nVidia chips, but they are still custom silicon in the sense of the GP comment. GCP, AWS, and Azure seem to all be diverging in their specialization. GCP is focusing more on AI/ML/Big Data offerings while AWS is more security-aware, and Azure is more hybrid-cloud focused.
azinman2 6y ago
Anyone else find it interesting that their revenue graph only starts in 2017? At what I’d assume to be a pretty low number given how long they’ve been around and how explosive the VM world has grown? Seems like if they hadn’t taken all that VC capital there’s no way they could have afforded any of their growth. It worried me that they’re only at a couple hundred MM in a self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years.
- quacker 6y ago
  It worried me that they’re only at a couple hundred MM in a self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years. Yes. How do they grow further? DO will be compared to AWS and Azure in the market, and there's a good chance their stock will be punished as a result. Plus, if DO actually makes in-roads in market share, AWS is a beast that, if it wants, can crush them on pricing and features for long enough to kill them.
czbond 6y ago
DOCN. Anyone know the date?
- dizzydot 6y ago
  Only official word I can find is Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. So....soon?
Jamieee 6y ago
I used Nanobox quite heavily before DO bought them. But was a bit surprised when I saw the below, does this mean that they only payed $3,544 for the company? Or is there more to it than that? > On April 4, 2019, the Company acquired 100% of the outstanding equity of Nanobox, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Nanobox”), a deployment and management platform provider for cloud infrastructure. The final purchase price for Nanobox was $3,544 and the acquisition has been accounted for as a business combination.
- iav 6y ago
  It’s in thousands - $3.5mm
  - Jamieee 6y ago
    I didn't spot that! Thanks! That's a bit better.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Should I disclose this? Well, why not? I interviewed at DO a few years ago. I don't want to share the details, but it was the most annoying, unprofessional and disorganized set of interviews that I have ever witnessed in my life (I did ~140-150 interviews in my life for ~25 companies). The best part is that I was introduced to the company by one of their board members. Since then I kept thinking that I really liked the product, but I would expect them to fail as a company. Maybe DO's IPO proves that I was wrong, or maybe that they will be economically successful despite what I have witnessed.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  Disclose what? There’s no actionable details there.
- vinay_ys 6y ago
  Was it just that they didn't have the usual setup of recruiters, coordinators etc to manage the hiring loop well? If they are less than 300 people company grown over a very slow pace, that's understandable.
pid_0 6y ago
I just cannot fathom why people would use a tier 2 cloud provider over AWS or GCP. It can't possibly be significantly cheaper. The tooling is non-existent. There is little third party tutorials/documentation compared to tier 1. Why would anyone buy this?
- johnthedebs 6y ago
  Because (comparing DO to AWS) it is much cheaper for many use cases, there is good tooling and documentation, and the user experience is dramatically better. I'm curious - on what did you base your assumptions?
  - pid_0 6y ago
    Years of tier 1 experience and trying to replicate those workloads on DO to see what the fuss is about. They are not remotely the same. How is the user experience better? Third party support like Terraform is objectively worse for DO
alfg 6y ago
Thank you Digital Ocean! I've been a customer since the early days and had just a few problems, but they were quick to answer and address. I love the simplicity of their platform and will continue to use their services!
Zelphyr 6y ago
I love DigitalOcean and would prefer to build my new project on their platform. Unfortunately, the one and only thing that is keeping me from doing so is their support. It's great, don't get me wrong. Whenever I've contacted them I've gotten helpful responses. However, for this particular project I feel like it is important to be able to get a human on a phone when I need support. If they offered that, I'd move away from AWS in a heartbeat.
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  but... have you ever gotten anyone useful and able to do anything for you on AWS exorbitantly priced support? in almost a decade, i havent. actually gotten more done tech related by calling the billing support, then i have through calling paid technical support. That said all my experiences with DO support were much worse.
utahcon 6y ago
Have been a user and fan of DO for years. Their product offering doesn't grow as fast as some cloud providers, but they are still my favorite for just about everything.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gregjw 6y ago
Cool! Long time user, good luck.
philliproso 6y ago
I have a $20pm droplet with ubuntu with auto updates (Including major release) from 2014. So it has done 14->18. DB with web app. I have never had anything more stable since.
gist 6y ago
Use case of DO vs. AWS or Google Cloud or similar?
pqdbr 6y ago
If someone from DigitalOcean is reading this, PLEASE, we need a datacenter in Brazil.
- toast0 6y ago
  Brazil is really expensive to operate in. A DC in Miami would reduce latency noticably, but should be reasonable costwise.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Curious why? Is it because of the insane taxes (100+%) on imported electronics? Employment taxes? Or some other reason?
croh 6y ago
Big fan of DO from start. Intutive UI, cheap resources, never had issue with infra. And great knowledge base. But the fact I loved most is a straight billing. There are never surprises at end of month. Sadly all mistakes done by AWS are picked up by other big vendors like GCP,Azure. Cloud vendors are more focused on adding as many features as possible. Who cares about user experience ? We got covered by certifications.
throwawaygulf 6y ago
I wonder how all the leftist activist employees that were shown the door feel after leaving six months ago. Bitcoin's meteoric rise, Coinbase market cap at the level that it is, IPO, etc. Coinbase reduced risk by kicking out leftists. Hopefully the rest of SV/Bay Area companies follow suit.
dbyrd 6y ago
I used to work at DigitalOcean. Can confirm we didn't think a lot about Linode. We saw AWS as the real competitor. If there was someone in the VPS market we respected and tried to emulate it would have been OVH, not Linode.
neycoda 6y ago
Public companies are when private companies have grown to the point that the leaders don't know what to do with it and can't figure out how to compete any longer.
ksec 6y ago
Congrats to DO. Really like the direction DO is going. Which is something in between millions of small VPS firm and giant like AWS. It also forced Linode to React. And proved the space in Cloud Hosting exist, which company like Vultr and UpCloud are now joining. And I think their features are finally close to hitting the perfect spot. With all the essential like DBaS, Object Storage and K8s. They have also ( finally ) introduced AMD EPYC CPU, ( no more explicit mention of Intel CPU on their homepage ). Which is good for their margin since price / core count are cheaper. So DO today is something I would like as an AWS competitor in 2016. And they are finally here. I am not sure if there are any other low hanging fruit at all. Or what features I would want for a company competing at this space. It will be things that people dont see, like CPU performance, SSD Performance, Services Reliability, Interconnect, Better Network, More Locations, security improvement.... There are only two suggestions I could think on top of my head right now. First is the pricing structure and list. It is getting very messy and AWS like. SSD Storage variant should be a simple calculable option, not an extra line on pricing table that tries to bombard me with extra information. And I know Basic Droplet are burst-able CPU resources, but not showing they are vCPU ( a Single Thread ) and calling them CPU doesn't really rhymes with me. Second is Full BareMetal Monthly option. Something like vultr [1] is offering. I am not sure if below $100 is feasible. Basically it should be something that offer much better price / performance at a monthly payment that pushes people with low spending to metal for baseline load with headroom as insurance. Pushing up Average User Spending. It should also be attractive to small business. ( Although arguably Linode and Vultr has yet to expand or launch Metal seems to suggest otherwise ) [1] https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/ https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  I'm a fan of DO too. In terms of "what's missing?", how about the equivalent of AWS Lambda@Edge or Cloudfront EdgeWorkers? ie, a NodeJS runtime as close to the end user as the nearest CDN edge.
  - ksec 6y ago
    The problem with Runtime at Edge is that they are extremely engineering intensive, given it isn't just hosting but the whole software stack involved. ( See CloudFlare Workers for Example ) Which is sort of outside the sweet spot that DO is currently enjoying or operating in. I am not sure if it is a sound strategic decision to persuade. Although I would certainly love to see competition in that area.
mxschmitt 6y ago
Maybe dumb more general question, but when is it then available on the stock market?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Mistri 6y ago
I bought my first DigitalOcean VPS for $5/month in high school. The same one is still running today, around 4 years later. One of the best investments I've ever made, allowing me to self-host a ton of my side projects, Discord bots, and anything else I might want. I've barely used half of my storage and my CPU/RAM is consistently sitting at 30-40% usage. Incredibly affordable for students like me. Plus, their interaction with students is fantastic (they throw free credits at us all the time).
ing33k 6y ago
They have an almost perfect, managed K8S offering. Major issue that I am facing with them currently is their managed load balancer offering. They have a cap of 40k Maximum Simultaneous Connections / second. I am mostly sure that they are not measuring it correctly. they have random resource limits which don't make sense. Also I think AWS lightsail is a competition to DO, but AWS doesn't seem to be promoting it that much.
- stvnitt 6y ago
  I had no idea they offered managed K8s. How does it compare to their competitors (if you’re knowledgeable about them as well?)
download13 6y ago
Does this mean we need to worry about service degrading as the company gets financialized?
ab_testing 6y ago
Can anyone tell from the S1, how much are they valuing themselves with 355M ARR in 2020.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I've been a happy Digital Ocean customer for years and would not bet against their continued growth!

DigitalOcean S-1

924 points by marc__1 6y ago

jimmyed 6y ago

One would imagine they'd make their APIs resilient before this?

unixhero 6y ago

Fantastic company.

rvz 6y ago

That sounds like a buy signal. I like this stock.

unixhero 6y ago
Well it is not listed just yet! What is it a buy signal for?
- jnwatson 6y ago
  That you can buy it at all is a buy signal. This is a sure sign of too much money chasing too few opportunities.

neom 6y ago

Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days, lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think everyone involved knew this day would come. Personally I'm really proud of the work we did, and I'm overjoyed to have been part of building a business that is going to be a public company. Thanks to the HN community for being so supportive over the years.

yte14 6y ago
The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did. I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker’s fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said product in its wake.
- neom 6y ago
  Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about. DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.
    - codegeek 6y ago
      I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times, it has been a horrendous experience.
      - bombcar 6y ago
        They make you call support to delete a “cloud server” - glad I’ll only have to do that once more.

yannoninator 6y ago

What is the point of DigitalOcean, Linode etc, when one can use the more reliable big cloud providers GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production. Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.

nowherebeen 6y ago
I think it mostly comes down to price (at least for me). They will always have to be cheaper than big cloud providers to stay competitive.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
The point is that they aren't GCP/AWS/Azure. I don't want to give more money to Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.
- nunodonato 6y ago
  This. Some of us are actually disgusted with amazon and prefer not to do business with it. Yes, even AWS
leesalminen 6y ago
While I wouldn’t use DO et. al. for my production environment (it’s on AWS), I’ve got a handful of ancillary services that don’t need the complexity of AWS. They’re so small and inconsequential to the business that I don’t want to spend any time thinking about the security risk of keeping them anywhere near production. They don’t need access to prod data so why put them in a position where they could potentially allow access to it? So, for me, the easiest thing was to be put them with a completely different company. Don’t have to worry about any potential issues with imitating it on AWS (via additional accounts, different region, etc) which are all prone to human failure over time. Maybe I’ve a bad reason, but it works for me and DO gets ~$50/mo from us and I’ve never considered switching.
6y ago

dukeofdoom 6y ago

So how does one buy ipo shares? One of my resolutions for this year was to buy shares in companies I do business with.

sithlord 6y ago
Be a giant investor, ie a bank. IPOs are there for banks to be able to buy up shares at a low price, then dump it when retail investors get their turn to run it up before banks sell off.
- cat199 6y ago
  another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain access to more wealth: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins/updated-3 https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... 200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).
  - milkshakes 6y ago
    being an accredited investor doesn’t magically get you IPO shares. they are very scarce and almost completely allocated to high volume institutions (you might get lucky if you have a very large relationship with one such institution but that’s harder and harder these days)
  - csmiller 6y ago
    I think you can just take the Series 65 and be good to go these days
  - eklavya 6y ago
    Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before they can sell it in the market.
    - 6y ago

fersarr 6y ago

So simple and nice to use

gizmo 6y ago

Excellent growth, fair margins. Probably worth about $3bn. If it IPOs at less than $5bn it's probably worth picking up. Long term digitalocean will struggle to maintain its margins when competing with Azure and AWS on one side, and Cloudflare edge computing on the other side, so I don't think it can command the same kind of premium we've seen from other tech IPOs. A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in only 357m in rev. That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too low.

jermaustin1 6y ago
> That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too low. I vaguely remember a talk I had with an employee there was a time when I think the average user was paying only $20/mo, which at the time, I had a $250-500/mo bill depending on load. This was before they even had a load balancer product (so 2012-2013-ish?), and I was running a fairly unsuccessful managed WordPress offering that had dynamic scaling based on the reported metrics. The infrastructure was just a big server for MySql, and a tiny server for the orchestrator. Then it would use the DO API to spin up new servers off a snapshot, ssh into them, and run the setup script to point to the right Wordpress instance in the database, then add it to the nginx reverse proxy list for the domain. The whole thing could scale up or down in 30 seconds. Sure it isn't as fast as AWS or Azure could scale, but we were in control, in code, before containerizing was even really a thing.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
I wonder what the distribution of revenue per customer looks like. I bet (hope?) that at the low end there are a lot of consumers who set up a $5 droplet to tinker around for a few months without doing much more, and that the revenue figures are propped up by a small group of bigger customers spending much more.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  I also think this distribution would be fascinating.
Thaxll 6y ago

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes Control Plane scaling is obfuscated. I had to contact support to realize that the control plane nodes are somehow tied to the size of your node pool when you create the cluster? That's not documented anywhere and was the cause of many control plane timeouts. 4. No ALIAS dns record, no way to serve Spaces from an apex domain. (I know this is a vendor specific implementation but it's table stakes imo) Again, I'm a (mostly) happy DO customer and wish them the best but if they really want to be seen on the same level as AWS or GCP in terms of some parity, they need to include some of these QoL features.

staticautomatic 6y ago
They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  They really do. And it goes in tangents and details I wouldn't have expected. Their support is great.
- skrtskrt 6y ago
  As I started learning how to spin up and manage Linux servers and then deploy my own (unmanaged) k8s on them, half of my bookmarks are DO documentation.
- bredren 6y ago
  Content growth done right.
- sdfhbdf 6y ago
  Yep great SEO Strategy and raising Brand awarness. Win-win for people searching. Find out about how to install nginx on Ubuntu and then memorize that next time you need a VM you go that blue website with great tutorials.

ArtWomb 6y ago

Would be interesting to see App Platform growth numbers. Lot's of competition: Heroku, Netlify, Fly.io, App Engine, Cloud Run, etc. But they may have hit the sweet spot in terms of features and pricing.

mauflows 6y ago
The missing feature for me is more cache control. It's behind cloudflare but not configurable. So you can't cache json for instance
- arcticfox 6y ago
  For me, the missing feature is ability to access private networks. (Noting here, for the DO product manager reviewing the thread..!)
  - phildougherty 6y ago
    Aware of this pain. Feedback noted :)
  - Tostino 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? Just wondering what you mean because I have been using private networks and haven't really run into many issues.
    - arcticfox 6y ago
      I don't think you can access them from the new App Platform, if I'm not mistaken. We use them heavily from regular Droplets, Kubernetes etc.

Graffur 6y ago

There's already a lot of positive comments in here but I'll throw in another one. Tried DO out recently and I like how it set up. I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.

tyingq 6y ago
I agree generally, but Lightsail is just obvious hot garbage. The CPU throttling is crazy aggressive, and you'll see it after 30 minutes of use, for all but the 2 most expensive of the 7 total plans. I don't see how they could be maintaining a decent customer base with that setup, but I guess marketing is powerful.
- sombremesa 6y ago
  I use Lightsail mostly to dodge Route 53 fees, since it comes with DNS management and I have a lot of hosted zones. However I'm also not a business and couldn't care less about the CPU throttling.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    That's interesting. I wonder if anyone has made some sort of api shim/facade to automate that route 53 avoidance.
sofixa 6y ago
> I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example. Nope, the biggest competition is in the same niche - Linode, OVH, Scaleway.
- Graffur 6y ago
  Is that what you think?

cube00 6y ago

They lost me after I couldn't switch from CentOS unless I also agreed to lose my IP address. Reached out to support and got the unhelpful reply of "use another OS version within the CentOS family" which didn't really help considering CentOS was charging its direction.

dubcanada 6y ago
You lost me there, their CentOS products are in a separate area then the rest of the OS's? Couldn't you just reformat with what ever OS you want?
- cube00 6y ago
  "You can use any image in your account that runs an OS that is in the same family as the Droplet you're rebuilding" https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/ I thought support could help me out given the CentOS situation and it being a special case but they weren't even aware of what was happening or that users would need to move off despite my explanation in the ticket. Hopefully it's better now it's more widely known.
  - riffic 6y ago
    > runs an OS that is in the same family as the Droplet you're rebuilding This line in the documentation might be misleading. Unless you have a very old legacy droplet that uses HV-assigned kernels, you should be able to reimage your droplet and use another OS.
covidthrow 6y ago
They have "floating IP addresses" as droplet-agnostic IPs for exactly this purpose.
- cube00 6y ago
  A floating IP address couldn't be used in my case because I needed a reverse DNS entry and "Floating IPs do not support PTR (rDNS) records." Along with other limitations such as "we do not support IPv6 floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4" and "floating IPs do not support SMTP traffic" https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/floating-ips/

daywednes 6y ago

what's their IPO valuation?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

breck 6y ago

Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean customer: . Those are the ones just off the top of my head. Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the past near decade. Excited to see they are financially very healthy.

wrycoder 6y ago
The only issue I've ever had is the login auth email can take 20 minutes to arrive at fastmail. This seems to have gotten better lately. What a great service!!
treesknees 6y ago
I ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at the time didn't have hourly rates. I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable hosting provider.
- cube00 6y ago
  It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and block the lot. I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a model like other providers have where you need to request permission to send mail from support. A selection over two years: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-digital-ocean-actually-prevent-abuse-via-spam-email https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-d... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-spam-digital-ocean https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-sp... https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious-does-digital-ocean-take-abuse-reports https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious...

babayega2 6y ago

Thank you DO for offering hosting for us in Africa who need a reliable hosting and fixed rates for the services so that we can plan ahead. Also the tutorials are a must have! Like today I used Django and DO Space and everything was smooth.

nickjj 6y ago

I've been using DO for around 6-7 years now. Really happy with the services overall. I hope nothing changes after IPO'ing. The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around for folks using Spaces. I'm looking forward to the day where Spaces is as good as S3 because DO's offering of Spaces includes not only an object store but a free CDN on top. Seems like a good deal for $5 bucks a month if it were dependable. It's weird because every other service I use by DO has been top notch.

wakatime 6y ago
Yep, same experience with Spaces here. That's why we use Spaces for backups only, since it's very affordable and backups don't need millisecond latency. https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-vs-aws-s3 https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...

api 6y ago

I find this really exciting, since DO has one of the only managed PGSQL + K8S combos that seems like it could compete with Google and AWS. Always nice to have more competition in this space. With IPO funding they can probably really compete. They'll probably have their own data centers soon.

acremades 6y ago

Here is the podcast episode where Ben and Moisey Uretsky share how they built DigitalOcean. Worth a listen. https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-humble-beginnings-these-two-russian-brothers-built-a-billion-dollar-business-in-america/ https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-hu...

aj_nikhil 6y ago

DO is a dream company. Build something like this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hu3 6y ago

edit: if you're going to downvote at least let me know why. I hold HN on high standards. DO is a fantastic value proposition. Reminds me when I was gathering cryptocurrency prices from exchanges and needed the lowest delay possible so an algorithm could protect me from pump-and-dumps. In my testings, a $5/month machine from Digital Ocean was the fastest to fetch prices from Bittrex. I got prices within 0.2 milliseconds (yes, under 1 millisecond). It was unbeliavable. The algo failed miserably ofc. Mostly because Exchanges price API tend to be unstable. Often giving stale or no data.

jtdev 6y ago

I was really considering moving from AWS to DO until I noticed this: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/#abuse So anyone who's offended by content you might host on DO can report your site and some identity politics obsessed bureauocrat decides if you're cancelled or not...? The public cloud has turned into an Orwellian nightmare.

1f60c 6y ago
From your link: > Report abuse: > > - DMCA Takedown > - Trademark Infringement > - Spam > - Phishing > - Malware > - Botnet > - Intrusion/exploit attempts (Bruteforce, Scans etc) > - Child Abuse > - Violent Threats and Harassment > - Other That seems like a reasonable list of stuff I wouldn't want to have my platform be used for, either. Though, one might reasonably take issue with that "Other" category, but note that--at least in the US--web hosts cannot be forced to host any content they don't want to.
- jtdev 6y ago
  I think you’re downplaying the “Other” category, which literally gives DO carte blanche in cancelling those they don’t approve of, or worse who the mob pressures DO to cancel. Do you not see how problematic this is? I agree with all of the other categories wholeheartedly, but even then, application of the policies of these organizations should be uniform, i.e., if both right wing and left wing websites publishes “Violent Threats and Harrassment”, both should be taken down. That’s not what we’re seeing in practice from the major cloud providers.
  - 1f60c 6y ago
    > Do you not see how problematic this is? Their platform, their rules.
    - jtdev 6y ago
      “Their platform” has become the public square. If you think allowing unfettered control of such a utility by a small number of mega corporations - with political biases that change to suit their bottom line - is a good thing then I’m not sure we’re on the same page, in the same book, on the same planet.

stephenSinniah 6y ago

From the risk factors summary: Implications of Being an Emerging Growth Company We are an “emerging growth company” as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. We may take advantage of certain exemptions from various public company reporting requirements, including not being required to have our internal controls over financial reporting audited by our independent registered public accounting firm under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements and exemptions from the requirements of holding a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier. In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an “emerging growth company” can delay adopting new or revised accounting standards until those standards apply to private companies. We have elected to take advantage of certain of the reduced disclosure obligations in the registration statement of which this prospectus is a part and may elect to take advantage of other reduced reporting requirements in future filings. As a result, the information that we provide to our stockholders may be different than you might receive from other public reporting companies in which you hold equity interests. Wow, I didn't know about this. Shouldn't financial reporting always be transparent?

paws 6y ago
Huh, that's a bit surprising. Can anyone point to examples of what kinds of disclosure obligations are reduced? e.g. liquidation multipliers?
gen220 6y ago
From your snippet: > We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier. The definition of "emerging growth company", from https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC > A company qualifies as an emerging growth company if it has total annual gross revenues of less than $1.07 billion during its most recently completed fiscal year and, as of December 8, 2011, had not sold common equity securities under a registration statement. A company continues to be an emerging growth company for the first five fiscal years after it completes an IPO, unless one of the following occurs: > - its total annual gross revenues are $1.07 billion or more > - it has issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt in the past three years or > - it becomes a “large accelerated filer,” as defined in Exchange Act Rule 12b-2 2020's gross revenue was 318m growing at 50-60m yoy from prior years. So, unless that growth is somehow compounding, the 5 years post-IPO is the most likely outcome. The biggest implications are relaxed requirements around explaining executive compensation, and that financial control auditing (SOX-compliance) is not required. It's not necessarily a bad thing for investors, but a trade-off. It means the company can focus more on growth and less elsewhere.

f430 6y ago

when will DigitalOCean IPO?

erwinh 6y ago

been a fan of DigitalOcean for years. Somehow they were able to bring a focus on usability to cloud offerings like no other provider could. Most recent thing that made my life 100x easier is their Apps platform with direct Github integrations for deployment of react apps removing any need to learn CI/CD stuff which I dont want to waste time on in early alpha startup phase :)

ivraatiems 6y ago

I might have mentioned this before, but DigitalOcean's support is (or was, before I stopped being their customer) absolutely abysmal. I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.) So I tried another browser, another computer, etc. The change never took. Finally, I contacted their support. It took a ton of back and forth with people who had dubious language comprehension before I finally convinced them anything other than user error was going on... but then, instead of fixing it, they demanded I take a video and upload it for them to prove it was real! I did, and I paid the invoice manually. The bug was eventually fixed after a month or two, but it was a pain until that happened. I found another provider who is cheaper for the resources I need and has better customer service by miles. If I can't get you to even take my money in an easy and reliable way, I can't trust you to operate anything I rely on.

oliverjudge 6y ago
Out of curiosity where did you move to?
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  I moved to BuyVM, https://buyvm.net/ https://buyvm.net/. I had already been using their services for a few years, I just expanded on what I already had. They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal. I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be represented in their behavior towards customers or who they choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel differently.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Not treating people differently based on their beliefs sounds like someone with leanings on either side, rather than extremists on either side.

dartf 6y ago

I really want to love DO, but I just can't. 2 main pain points I had from working with it for ~3 month: 1. Spaces keys. There is no way to fine tune access rights. Anyone with spaces key can access any space in the organization and read/write to it. I trust people I work with, but there is always room for a mistake, so even a small chance that someone can accidentally nuke our production space makes me nervous. 2. Something from yesterday: we use new DO apps to deploy a static web app. Yesterday I started to get random 404s for some of the assets, so app become unusable. My colleague in Argentina had same issues, but for different assets. We are lucky that it was a staging app, but imagine it was a production app and that would happen over the weekend? How do you even detect that? Run uptime monitor form dozen different locations?

Sebguer 6y ago
Completely unrelated to DO, but for 2, yes? You should absolutely do something like that if an app needs to be accessible worldwide. There are many reasons an app might become unavailable for different parts of the world, especially if you're reliant on a CDN since POPs can fail or become unavailable in weird and silent ways. Something like Thousandeyes is good for this.

pjfin123 6y ago

Please add GPUs! Google cloud and AWS's interfaces are hard to use. I recently discovered vast.ai which is great but cheap DO GPUs would be more trusted/professional (even if they only had one option).

trsohmers 6y ago
(Shameless self promotion): Check out Lambda's GPU cloud: https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud
- lvs 6y ago
  Are you planning to have an option that is CPU heavy with 1xGPU for CPU-bound loads? Like a g4ad, g4dn type of configuration?

emgo 6y ago

The biggest threat to DigitalOcean is that AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips. Over times they'll be able to get hardware for cheaper, and also more specialized hardware that uses less power. DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft, essentially giving money to their competition. If DigitalOcean doesn't get into semiconductors quickly, the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider as a low-cost branch, like airlines do.

natchy 6y ago
> the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider Or acquired by a chip maker, like Intel.
libria 6y ago
> AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips What are the GCP and Azure equivalents of AWS Nitro?
- roland35 6y ago
  Here is an article about Azure at least: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-processors-chips-servers-surface-report https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-p... “Because silicon is a foundational building block for technology, we’re continuing to invest in our own capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing and tools, while also fostering and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip providers,” says Microsoft’s communications chief Frank Shaw.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  For GCP, it depends. GCP doesn't have a Nitro competitor, but they offer Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are more of a competitor to nVidia chips, but they are still custom silicon in the sense of the GP comment. GCP, AWS, and Azure seem to all be diverging in their specialization. GCP is focusing more on AI/ML/Big Data offerings while AWS is more security-aware, and Azure is more hybrid-cloud focused.

azinman2 6y ago

Anyone else find it interesting that their revenue graph only starts in 2017? At what I’d assume to be a pretty low number given how long they’ve been around and how explosive the VM world has grown? Seems like if they hadn’t taken all that VC capital there’s no way they could have afforded any of their growth. It worried me that they’re only at a couple hundred MM in a self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years.

quacker 6y ago
It worried me that they’re only at a couple hundred MM in a self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years. Yes. How do they grow further? DO will be compared to AWS and Azure in the market, and there's a good chance their stock will be punished as a result. Plus, if DO actually makes in-roads in market share, AWS is a beast that, if it wants, can crush them on pricing and features for long enough to kill them.

czbond 6y ago

DOCN. Anyone know the date?

dizzydot 6y ago
Only official word I can find is Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. So....soon?

Jamieee 6y ago

I used Nanobox quite heavily before DO bought them. But was a bit surprised when I saw the below, does this mean that they only payed $3,544 for the company? Or is there more to it than that? > On April 4, 2019, the Company acquired 100% of the outstanding equity of Nanobox, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Nanobox”), a deployment and management platform provider for cloud infrastructure. The final purchase price for Nanobox was $3,544 and the acquisition has been accounted for as a business combination.

iav 6y ago
It’s in thousands - $3.5mm
- Jamieee 6y ago
  I didn't spot that! Thanks! That's a bit better.
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simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Should I disclose this? Well, why not? I interviewed at DO a few years ago. I don't want to share the details, but it was the most annoying, unprofessional and disorganized set of interviews that I have ever witnessed in my life (I did ~140-150 interviews in my life for ~25 companies). The best part is that I was introduced to the company by one of their board members. Since then I kept thinking that I really liked the product, but I would expect them to fail as a company. Maybe DO's IPO proves that I was wrong, or maybe that they will be economically successful despite what I have witnessed.

ianlevesque 6y ago
Disclose what? There’s no actionable details there.
vinay_ys 6y ago
Was it just that they didn't have the usual setup of recruiters, coordinators etc to manage the hiring loop well? If they are less than 300 people company grown over a very slow pace, that's understandable.

pid_0 6y ago

I just cannot fathom why people would use a tier 2 cloud provider over AWS or GCP. It can't possibly be significantly cheaper. The tooling is non-existent. There is little third party tutorials/documentation compared to tier 1. Why would anyone buy this?

johnthedebs 6y ago
Because (comparing DO to AWS) it is much cheaper for many use cases, there is good tooling and documentation, and the user experience is dramatically better. I'm curious - on what did you base your assumptions?
- pid_0 6y ago
  Years of tier 1 experience and trying to replicate those workloads on DO to see what the fuss is about. They are not remotely the same. How is the user experience better? Third party support like Terraform is objectively worse for DO

alfg 6y ago

Thank you Digital Ocean! I've been a customer since the early days and had just a few problems, but they were quick to answer and address. I love the simplicity of their platform and will continue to use their services!

Zelphyr 6y ago

I love DigitalOcean and would prefer to build my new project on their platform. Unfortunately, the one and only thing that is keeping me from doing so is their support. It's great, don't get me wrong. Whenever I've contacted them I've gotten helpful responses. However, for this particular project I feel like it is important to be able to get a human on a phone when I need support. If they offered that, I'd move away from AWS in a heartbeat.

mtnGoat 6y ago
but... have you ever gotten anyone useful and able to do anything for you on AWS exorbitantly priced support? in almost a decade, i havent. actually gotten more done tech related by calling the billing support, then i have through calling paid technical support. That said all my experiences with DO support were much worse.

utahcon 6y ago

Have been a user and fan of DO for years. Their product offering doesn't grow as fast as some cloud providers, but they are still my favorite for just about everything.

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gregjw 6y ago

Cool! Long time user, good luck.

philliproso 6y ago

I have a $20pm droplet with ubuntu with auto updates (Including major release) from 2014. So it has done 14->18. DB with web app. I have never had anything more stable since.

gist 6y ago

Use case of DO vs. AWS or Google Cloud or similar?

pqdbr 6y ago

If someone from DigitalOcean is reading this, PLEASE, we need a datacenter in Brazil.

toast0 6y ago
Brazil is really expensive to operate in. A DC in Miami would reduce latency noticably, but should be reasonable costwise.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Curious why? Is it because of the insane taxes (100+%) on imported electronics? Employment taxes? Or some other reason?

croh 6y ago

Big fan of DO from start. Intutive UI, cheap resources, never had issue with infra. And great knowledge base. But the fact I loved most is a straight billing. There are never surprises at end of month. Sadly all mistakes done by AWS are picked up by other big vendors like GCP,Azure. Cloud vendors are more focused on adding as many features as possible. Who cares about user experience ? We got covered by certifications.

throwawaygulf 6y ago

I wonder how all the leftist activist employees that were shown the door feel after leaving six months ago. Bitcoin's meteoric rise, Coinbase market cap at the level that it is, IPO, etc. Coinbase reduced risk by kicking out leftists. Hopefully the rest of SV/Bay Area companies follow suit.

dbyrd 6y ago

I used to work at DigitalOcean. Can confirm we didn't think a lot about Linode. We saw AWS as the real competitor. If there was someone in the VPS market we respected and tried to emulate it would have been OVH, not Linode.

neycoda 6y ago

Public companies are when private companies have grown to the point that the leaders don't know what to do with it and can't figure out how to compete any longer.

ksec 6y ago

Congrats to DO. Really like the direction DO is going. Which is something in between millions of small VPS firm and giant like AWS. It also forced Linode to React. And proved the space in Cloud Hosting exist, which company like Vultr and UpCloud are now joining. And I think their features are finally close to hitting the perfect spot. With all the essential like DBaS, Object Storage and K8s. They have also ( finally ) introduced AMD EPYC CPU, ( no more explicit mention of Intel CPU on their homepage ). Which is good for their margin since price / core count are cheaper. So DO today is something I would like as an AWS competitor in 2016. And they are finally here. I am not sure if there are any other low hanging fruit at all. Or what features I would want for a company competing at this space. It will be things that people dont see, like CPU performance, SSD Performance, Services Reliability, Interconnect, Better Network, More Locations, security improvement.... There are only two suggestions I could think on top of my head right now. First is the pricing structure and list. It is getting very messy and AWS like. SSD Storage variant should be a simple calculable option, not an extra line on pricing table that tries to bombard me with extra information. And I know Basic Droplet are burst-able CPU resources, but not showing they are vCPU ( a Single Thread ) and calling them CPU doesn't really rhymes with me. Second is Full BareMetal Monthly option. Something like vultr [1] is offering. I am not sure if below $100 is feasible. Basically it should be something that offer much better price / performance at a monthly payment that pushes people with low spending to metal for baseline load with headroom as insurance. Pushing up Average User Spending. It should also be attractive to small business. ( Although arguably Linode and Vultr has yet to expand or launch Metal seems to suggest otherwise ) [1] https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/ https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/

chrisweekly 6y ago
I'm a fan of DO too. In terms of "what's missing?", how about the equivalent of AWS Lambda@Edge or Cloudfront EdgeWorkers? ie, a NodeJS runtime as close to the end user as the nearest CDN edge.
- ksec 6y ago
  The problem with Runtime at Edge is that they are extremely engineering intensive, given it isn't just hosting but the whole software stack involved. ( See CloudFlare Workers for Example ) Which is sort of outside the sweet spot that DO is currently enjoying or operating in. I am not sure if it is a sound strategic decision to persuade. Although I would certainly love to see competition in that area.

mxschmitt 6y ago

Maybe dumb more general question, but when is it then available on the stock market?

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Mistri 6y ago

I bought my first DigitalOcean VPS for $5/month in high school. The same one is still running today, around 4 years later. One of the best investments I've ever made, allowing me to self-host a ton of my side projects, Discord bots, and anything else I might want. I've barely used half of my storage and my CPU/RAM is consistently sitting at 30-40% usage. Incredibly affordable for students like me. Plus, their interaction with students is fantastic (they throw free credits at us all the time).

ing33k 6y ago

They have an almost perfect, managed K8S offering. Major issue that I am facing with them currently is their managed load balancer offering. They have a cap of 40k Maximum Simultaneous Connections / second. I am mostly sure that they are not measuring it correctly. they have random resource limits which don't make sense. Also I think AWS lightsail is a competition to DO, but AWS doesn't seem to be promoting it that much.

stvnitt 6y ago
I had no idea they offered managed K8s. How does it compare to their competitors (if you’re knowledgeable about them as well?)

download13 6y ago

Does this mean we need to worry about service degrading as the company gets financialized?

ab_testing 6y ago

Can anyone tell from the S1, how much are they valuing themselves with 355M ARR in 2020.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

I've been a happy Digital Ocean customer for years and would not bet against their continued growth!