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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 en

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.
Kovah 6y ago
Easy setup and maintenance, and reliable pricing. Order a Unix server for $10 per month, 1TB traffic included, and you get a server with fixed hardware specs. If you get more customers, you scale the server and pay a higher price. On AWS and others: spin up a server that costs more in comparision to Digitalocean, and prepare to find costs on your bill you never thought you would have: traffic, permanent storage, logging,...
jsight 6y ago
It seems to me that these services are much more cost effective than AWS.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  They're not... Look at the pricing between DO Droplets and AWS Lightsail instances for example
- cashewchoo 6y ago
  This. DO, imo, crushes AWS's pricing, documentation and ease of use for anyone but big enterprises. I used their managed k8s for a personal project as someone who's never used k8s before and it: * didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.
  - RKearney 6y ago
    How do you figure? $10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth. $10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.
    - cashewchoo 6y ago
      Their VPS pricing is competitive but pretty much everything else isn't. Specifically, I'm looking at EKS vs DO managed k8s, block storage for VPS's, and so on.
      - RKearney 6y ago
        DO charges $0.10/GB per month for block storage, the same as AWS Lightsail charges for block storage. AWS also has Lightsail Containers which are far cheaper than EKS and is their DO/Linode/etc equivalent. Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month. DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.
pmorici 6y ago
Simpler and less complex?
- yannoninator 6y ago
  They currently have an incident with their droplets right now at the time of writing, hardly reliable.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Remember when an AWS outage a few months ago took down like half the Internet?
    - FDSGSG 6y ago
      Yeah, but nobody is going to blame you when half of the internet is down.
BasedInfra 6y ago
The pie is big enough and also don’t think big cloud players and DO are after the same customers. 34% of the web still runs on Wordpress. A lot want somewhere cheap and easy to use with more power than shared hosting.
- yannoninator 6y ago
  AWS LightSail is basically DigitalOcean with a huge jetpack with the ability to extend into AWS's ecosystem.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    You on the AWS Social Media Team or something? People don't want to do business with Amazon.
  - ksec 6y ago
    LightSail is really really slow. You will have to pay double to get similar CPU performance to DO. But I guess that is the price you pay for being AWS ready.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
More transparent pricing, faster iteration cycle on new features, easy-to-use cloud UI, developer tooling, etc
rmorey 6y ago
I think the value prop is simplicity and customer service. DO/Linode/Vultr offer a way simplified product that's perfect for the long tail of users that don't need all the more advanced aws/gcp features. Plenty of great businesses are already being run on these smaller platforms. And you just have to read one of the GCP account horror stories on here to get the opportunity for better customer service for SMB customers
lbotos 6y ago
for some of us, it's a desire to not give Google, Amazon, or Microsoft any money. The big clouds offer great features, but My 5/mo Linode is fine to run a 3 user matrix server. (I used to work at Linode, but that didn't sway my desire to avoid the big 3.)
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  Oh hey cool to see you in here! Thanks for referring me all those years ago - I'm still there! :)
snarfy 6y ago
What's not strong about them? Not everybody needs or wants AWS's 1000+ service offerings. Managed k8s and databases are all most people want.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  What’s uptime like on DO managed databases? The primary thing keeping me on AWS is Aurora for MySQL. The uptime we’ve experienced is phenomenal.
jnwatson 6y ago
The company I work for solely uses DO. It has all the things you might want that won't get you cloud vendor locked. Plus their UI is actually useable, unlike my experience with AWS. Many SV startups just end up taking their VC investment and handing it to AWS over a period of 18 months.
jwr 6y ago
I use DO because it's simple and easy. I got tired of dealing with AWS corporate-sized crap, all I want is to spin up several servers using terraform and get work done. They way you can automatically apply firewalling rules to server tags, for example, is exactly what I need. And don't even mention Azure, where I feel like in a huge maze of mirrors. Nothing is simple, and you waste lots of time on clicking and figuring things out. So yes, DO has very real value, and I'm glad they exist. The only roughly comparable provider I found was Vultr, which I like quite a bit, too.
mgkimsal 6y ago
Doing anything with those big vendors is an absolute headache, and requires a lot of vendor-specific knowledge/experience, which is expensive (and their offerings are generally expensive and/or harder to estimate pricing on). DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable audience of users who do not need the complexities that those larger vendors offer. I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an existing ubuntu image on Azure in 2018. Documentation sucked - both what was there and discoverability. Their instructions just... didn't work, the UI was incredibly .... Azure wasn't my choice - client had O365 and their 'IT vendor' had 'credits' on Azure, so... I had to go with Azure... and it was a huge time sink to do some basic stuff that is literally a few clicks with DO and Linode. Yes, I don't think I can create private VPNs in the cloud with DO - I don't need to for most projects. The level of functionality DO/Linode/etc provide is adequate for a lot of projects, and they are growing their new functionality to serve needs in a way that seems usable by people without needing to be a certified expert in BigVendorCo.
- yannoninator 6y ago
  I think AWS LightSail is what you would want, also Cloud Run is also another option.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    AWS Lightsail is not available on Azure. And... there's nothing inherently horrible about lightsail, but if I've decided that's all I need, I may go with other companies that have that model as their main focus. If I decide I want more of the AWS infrastructure, I'd stay in AWS (or... GCP, or Azure, or whatever).
tyingq 6y ago
For many use cases, the included free bandwidth and no "oops I just spent a lot more than I intended to" features make DO vastly superior to AWS/GCP/Azure.
tw04 6y ago
Do you think Kia or Toyota (the brand, not the company) have a long term play, or is everyone going to shift to Lexus, Mercedes and BMW? Not everyone is interested in paying the exhorbitant pricing the big cloud providers charge, regardless of features. Now they might get acquired by the big boys and run under their existing brands as a low cost alternative. But the services aren't going away. I'm willing to bet the big guys want nothing to do with them though. It'll just eat into their margin.
azemetre 6y ago
I don’t own a business just personal projects, but one reason why I prefer DO over AWS, GCP, and Azure is the billing aspect. With DO I just buy credits and if I go over the limit they cancel my services, I’m fine with that. With AWS I could rack up an insane bill, I’m not fine with that. Notifications about billing is not the same as suspending all services. This is why I like DO. If other cloud providers do have this please lmk because nothing makes me more nervous than having my personal CC on file with very little retribution as a consumer (I don’t want to get banned from all Google services for doing a charge back).
syshum 6y ago
The offerings of DO and others are simpliar That is the target, AWS you need a math degree to understand the billing and even then you will never know exactly what you will be billed until you are actually billed... This is not the case with DO and Linode Sure for a large enterprise that needs that complexity and flexiblity to squeeze every penny out it would not be a good fit but for SMB work loads, it is great
eljimmy 6y ago
I've been using Linode for 7 years now and I've had very little downtime. Pretty reliable in my experience. Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.
stanmancan 6y ago
Simplicity. As a solo dev I find AWS and GCP to be a nightmare. I do t have time to learn either interface, and not doing so is dangerous as not knowing the inner workings can have security or reliability consequences. Just look at all the exposed S3 buckets over the years. Just picking a VPS from Amazon is an absolute nightmare. All the different levels, with the credit bullshit. DO I can log in, pick a VPS with the specs I need and be done with it. I don’t need to worry about over using it and running out of credits and being throttled and having that to troubleshoot. DO has been reliable for me, affordable, and incredibly easy to understand and use.

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.

Kovah 6y ago

Easy setup and maintenance, and reliable pricing. Order a Unix server for $10 per month, 1TB traffic included, and you get a server with fixed hardware specs. If you get more customers, you scale the server and pay a higher price. On AWS and others: spin up a server that costs more in comparision to Digitalocean, and prepare to find costs on your bill you never thought you would have: traffic, permanent storage, logging,...

jsight 6y ago

It seems to me that these services are much more cost effective than AWS.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
They're not... Look at the pricing between DO Droplets and AWS Lightsail instances for example
cashewchoo 6y ago
This. DO, imo, crushes AWS's pricing, documentation and ease of use for anyone but big enterprises. I used their managed k8s for a personal project as someone who's never used k8s before and it: * didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.
- RKearney 6y ago
  How do you figure? $10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth. $10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.
  - cashewchoo 6y ago
    Their VPS pricing is competitive but pretty much everything else isn't. Specifically, I'm looking at EKS vs DO managed k8s, block storage for VPS's, and so on.
    - RKearney 6y ago
      DO charges $0.10/GB per month for block storage, the same as AWS Lightsail charges for block storage. AWS also has Lightsail Containers which are far cheaper than EKS and is their DO/Linode/etc equivalent. Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month. DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.

pmorici 6y ago

Simpler and less complex?

yannoninator 6y ago
They currently have an incident with their droplets right now at the time of writing, hardly reliable.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Remember when an AWS outage a few months ago took down like half the Internet?
  - FDSGSG 6y ago
    Yeah, but nobody is going to blame you when half of the internet is down.

BasedInfra 6y ago

The pie is big enough and also don’t think big cloud players and DO are after the same customers. 34% of the web still runs on Wordpress. A lot want somewhere cheap and easy to use with more power than shared hosting.

yannoninator 6y ago
AWS LightSail is basically DigitalOcean with a huge jetpack with the ability to extend into AWS's ecosystem.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  You on the AWS Social Media Team or something? People don't want to do business with Amazon.
- ksec 6y ago
  LightSail is really really slow. You will have to pay double to get similar CPU performance to DO. But I guess that is the price you pay for being AWS ready.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

More transparent pricing, faster iteration cycle on new features, easy-to-use cloud UI, developer tooling, etc

rmorey 6y ago

I think the value prop is simplicity and customer service. DO/Linode/Vultr offer a way simplified product that's perfect for the long tail of users that don't need all the more advanced aws/gcp features. Plenty of great businesses are already being run on these smaller platforms. And you just have to read one of the GCP account horror stories on here to get the opportunity for better customer service for SMB customers

lbotos 6y ago

for some of us, it's a desire to not give Google, Amazon, or Microsoft any money. The big clouds offer great features, but My 5/mo Linode is fine to run a 3 user matrix server. (I used to work at Linode, but that didn't sway my desire to avoid the big 3.)

ryukafalz 6y ago
Oh hey cool to see you in here! Thanks for referring me all those years ago - I'm still there! :)

snarfy 6y ago

What's not strong about them? Not everybody needs or wants AWS's 1000+ service offerings. Managed k8s and databases are all most people want.

leesalminen 6y ago
What’s uptime like on DO managed databases? The primary thing keeping me on AWS is Aurora for MySQL. The uptime we’ve experienced is phenomenal.

jnwatson 6y ago

The company I work for solely uses DO. It has all the things you might want that won't get you cloud vendor locked. Plus their UI is actually useable, unlike my experience with AWS. Many SV startups just end up taking their VC investment and handing it to AWS over a period of 18 months.

jwr 6y ago

I use DO because it's simple and easy. I got tired of dealing with AWS corporate-sized crap, all I want is to spin up several servers using terraform and get work done. They way you can automatically apply firewalling rules to server tags, for example, is exactly what I need. And don't even mention Azure, where I feel like in a huge maze of mirrors. Nothing is simple, and you waste lots of time on clicking and figuring things out. So yes, DO has very real value, and I'm glad they exist. The only roughly comparable provider I found was Vultr, which I like quite a bit, too.

mgkimsal 6y ago

Doing anything with those big vendors is an absolute headache, and requires a lot of vendor-specific knowledge/experience, which is expensive (and their offerings are generally expensive and/or harder to estimate pricing on). DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable audience of users who do not need the complexities that those larger vendors offer. I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an existing ubuntu image on Azure in 2018. Documentation sucked - both what was there and discoverability. Their instructions just... didn't work, the UI was incredibly .... Azure wasn't my choice - client had O365 and their 'IT vendor' had 'credits' on Azure, so... I had to go with Azure... and it was a huge time sink to do some basic stuff that is literally a few clicks with DO and Linode. Yes, I don't think I can create private VPNs in the cloud with DO - I don't need to for most projects. The level of functionality DO/Linode/etc provide is adequate for a lot of projects, and they are growing their new functionality to serve needs in a way that seems usable by people without needing to be a certified expert in BigVendorCo.

yannoninator 6y ago
I think AWS LightSail is what you would want, also Cloud Run is also another option.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  AWS Lightsail is not available on Azure. And... there's nothing inherently horrible about lightsail, but if I've decided that's all I need, I may go with other companies that have that model as their main focus. If I decide I want more of the AWS infrastructure, I'd stay in AWS (or... GCP, or Azure, or whatever).

tyingq 6y ago

For many use cases, the included free bandwidth and no "oops I just spent a lot more than I intended to" features make DO vastly superior to AWS/GCP/Azure.

tw04 6y ago

Do you think Kia or Toyota (the brand, not the company) have a long term play, or is everyone going to shift to Lexus, Mercedes and BMW? Not everyone is interested in paying the exhorbitant pricing the big cloud providers charge, regardless of features. Now they might get acquired by the big boys and run under their existing brands as a low cost alternative. But the services aren't going away. I'm willing to bet the big guys want nothing to do with them though. It'll just eat into their margin.

azemetre 6y ago

I don’t own a business just personal projects, but one reason why I prefer DO over AWS, GCP, and Azure is the billing aspect. With DO I just buy credits and if I go over the limit they cancel my services, I’m fine with that. With AWS I could rack up an insane bill, I’m not fine with that. Notifications about billing is not the same as suspending all services. This is why I like DO. If other cloud providers do have this please lmk because nothing makes me more nervous than having my personal CC on file with very little retribution as a consumer (I don’t want to get banned from all Google services for doing a charge back).

syshum 6y ago

The offerings of DO and others are simpliar That is the target, AWS you need a math degree to understand the billing and even then you will never know exactly what you will be billed until you are actually billed... This is not the case with DO and Linode Sure for a large enterprise that needs that complexity and flexiblity to squeeze every penny out it would not be a good fit but for SMB work loads, it is great

eljimmy 6y ago

I've been using Linode for 7 years now and I've had very little downtime. Pretty reliable in my experience. Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.

stanmancan 6y ago

Simplicity. As a solo dev I find AWS and GCP to be a nightmare. I do t have time to learn either interface, and not doing so is dangerous as not knowing the inner workings can have security or reliability consequences. Just look at all the exposed S3 buckets over the years. Just picking a VPS from Amazon is an absolute nightmare. All the different levels, with the credit bullshit. DO I can log in, pick a VPS with the specs I need and be done with it. I don’t need to worry about over using it and running out of credits and being throttled and having that to troubleshoot. DO has been reliable for me, affordable, and incredibly easy to understand and use.