7 ms·

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

by 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.
- paulie_a 6y ago
  Rackspace was always overpriced garbage
yte14 6y ago
I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.) Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea. It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?
- fastball 6y ago
  You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here. If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.
  - yte14 6y ago
    I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.
    - jiofih 6y ago
      He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments. EDIT: s/general public/others
      - yte14 6y ago
        I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo. Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.
        jiofih 6y ago
        I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.
        random5634 6y ago
        I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit. Security: One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go. Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this? They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later? These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode. There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?). --- Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security. I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!
CerealFounder 6y ago
The real story is Ben and Moisey were running one of the largest hosting co's in porn and then there was a security problem via one of their upstream providers and it created a DISASTER. Thats how DO was born from what I understand.

by neom 6y ago

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.
paulie_a 6y ago
Rackspace was always overpriced garbage

yte14 6y ago

I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.) Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea. It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?

fastball 6y ago
You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here. If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.
- yte14 6y ago
  I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments. EDIT: s/general public/others
    - yte14 6y ago
      I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo. Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.
      - jiofih 6y ago
        I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.
      - random5634 6y ago
        I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit. Security: One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go. Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this? They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later? These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode. There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170 I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?). --- Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security. I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!

CerealFounder 6y ago

The real story is Ben and Moisey were running one of the largest hosting co's in porn and then there was a security problem via one of their upstream providers and it created a DISASTER. Thats how DO was born from what I understand.