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DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

825 points by nilsandrey 5y ago

novateg 5y ago
I've been using the CSS-Tricks site since 2008. It's one of the best sites on internet and has great community of developers. Congrats to Chris Coyier and the team!
lelandfe 5y ago
I’ll be the first to say: congrats to Chris! Just an excellent guy - and he’s been contributing so much good writing to the web development community for so long, he deserves a pay day.
bilekas 5y ago
Does seem a bit of a strange fit for DigitalOcean. That said, they seem like a solid company and they really do have some really good tutorials/knowledgebase. Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.
- azemetre 5y ago
  Not that strange. DigitalOcean has (or had?) a great forum for asking tech questions on setting up droplets and other DO services. It was very community driven. I relied on it often when I first made my VPS back in 2013.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    Yeah their docs have always been top notch. Couldn't have found a better home IMO.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  They did buy launchaco, maybe their move is "build your stuff and host it on our stuff"
  - jasongill 5y ago
    Launchaco got bought by Namecheap
    - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
      I'm not sure what I was thinking when I typed that.
- XCSme 5y ago
  Well, CSS-tricks is used by web developers. Web developers are a big slice of DO's target market, as they usually need servers/hosting.
gotts 5y ago
Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place? Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
- gzer0 5y ago
  DO has really been expanding their SEO in terms of the generic "How to install X on Ubuntu" search term (albeit, this is particular for CSS-tricks). I often see them ranked near the top for many of these searches. I think it's a great addition if that's what DO is going for.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  DigitalOcean writes a ton of tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
  - libertine 5y ago
    >Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see. I think they shouldn't touch it and let CSS-Tricks continue to do their own thing.
  - Matsta 5y ago
    I imagine they'll put links into their strongest pages and then eventually 301 the domain. In a comment above they mentioned DO has also acquired Scotch. io and that 301s to DO now.
- rozenmd 5y ago
  Being a media company that happens to sell SaaS subscriptions is becoming a popular way to solve the traction problem.
- electric_muse 5y ago
  I've spent some time with Digital Ocean team members, and they're dead-set on having the best technical content on the internet. It's been a core to their growth strategy so far: - Target long-tail searches -- queries where there may not be a lot of volume but also not a lot of competition - Stand out with very good content (not just SEO filler) - Build trust with the dev community This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy. So acquiring large tranches like this makes sense.
smashah 5y ago
Congrats!
ramesh31 5y ago
I (and I'm sure many others here) owe my career to Chris. HTML never "clicked" for me, until I watched one of his screencasts breaking down a design and building a page from scratch. The rest is history.
ElectronShak 5y ago
Whether it be setting up a LAMP stack on a server, securing nginx with Lets Encrypt, deploying a python ML model as a web service, you name it, DigitalOcean's tutorials just work. Thanks Digital Ocean! PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.
- skilled 5y ago
  I've been a DO customer since 2013 and never in that time have I hosted any of my sites or apps on other platforms. They're super good in every department; support, pricing, tools, and of course, tutorials. Only a shame they rolled out all the affiliate credits. In the first year I generated like $1,500 in affiliate revenue from a single review post I did. At the rate of $5 per droplet, that's 25 years worth of hosting. I didn't get the full 25 but still happy to pay for their services.
  - huehehue 5y ago
    Big fan of DO. I have a Droplet I haven't accessed in 7 years. I'm pretty sure if I look at it the wrong way it will break, but it's been running the same app with no downtime like a champ.
  - npsimons 5y ago
    Honestly, as another satisfied customer, I jumped on the opportunity to buy some of their stock. I believe it's a solid investment.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    I agree DO is good in pricing, tools, and tutorials. But support? I've had terrible experiences with DO support, enough so that I fled to a different provider. Maybe they're improving, but DO tends to drop the account lock hammer quickly on first sign of any anomaly that the algorithm doesn't like, rendering the victim helpless and relegated to groveling and begging for compassion. One can hope that a tweet gets picked up by HN or other media to get their attention, but alas, such is not typical.
skilled 5y ago
Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris. Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there. Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[2]. Absolute genius. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digitalocean https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digit... [1]: https://twitter.com/chris__sev https://twitter.com/chris__sev [2]: https://www.better.dev/ https://www.better.dev/
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - skilled 5y ago
    I'm guessing that is what happened. Maybe it was a clause in the contract? If Chris reads this comment maybe he can chime in to clarify. I should have made that clear in my original comment, though. I found out about it by doing keyword research for a piece I was doing. Better.dev was one of the sites that ranked extremely well for it and I hadn't heard of the name before. Upon closer inspection, I learned that the post is an old Scotch.io article which is being redirected to his new project.
    - Matsta 5y ago
      Scotch.io redirects to Digital Ocean Community site when I checked just now. I imagine a big reason it was acquired for the sweet domain authority for SEO. You can see that Scotch.io was dying off in traffic [1] - I would assume it wasn't getting new content regularly enough. The domain is pretty powerful, so even pushing some traffic to Better.dev [2] via 301's would have helped both sites out. I imagine better.dev would have agreed to promote DO and put some links on their top pages to give the DigitalOcean domain even more SEO power. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa [2] - https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt
seanw444 5y ago
This is one of the few instances where I can say I trust the acquiring company. I've been a fan of DigitalOcean since I started using them. They haven't given me a reason to dislike them. And like the post says, they do write some handy tutorials. One that's helped me a few times is how to spin up a quick FTP server on Debian, because for some reason I can never configure it right. Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  I'm a digo customer, but even if I weren't I'd still be using a lot of their online documentation.
helipad 5y ago
All frontend developers: keep the Flexbox article alive please.
- PaulBGD_ 5y ago
  I would love to see what % of their visits is the flexbox article.
  - skilled 5y ago
    I bet it is in the millions. I help manage some sites which have CSS tutorials on them, and even if the article is about something like "How to use the CSS counter() property" - if you have the words "center" and "div" mentioned in the article, Google Search Console will report impressions for that article with keywords like "how to center a div". Funny!
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    That and the grids article are probably the most used bookmarked articles I have perused.
  - for1nner 5y ago
    Well at least 50% of that % is me forgetting which is justify-content and which is align-items... Words are hard
  - swyx 5y ago
    7.6% this number is public: https://css-tricks.com/thank-you-2021-edition/ https://css-tricks.com/thank-you-2021-edition/ total traffic 88m, flexbox is 6.7m of that. speaks to their deep bench tbh.
- jostylr 5y ago
  Their guides are indispensable for my occasional dabbling. Just saved flexbox and grid guides using the SingleFile extension, something I discovered a couple of weeks ago here on HN. HN warns and provides solutions. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/
bjarneh 5y ago
> You can build anything on DigitalOcean I was almost expecting that text to be a link to zombo.com
Jerrrry 5y ago
Let's go!!!! Congratulations Chris. Me and others owe our careers in webdev and our CSS sourcery magic to your great articles.
mxuribe 5y ago
Congrats to the CSS-Tricks team!
electric_muse 5y ago
I've also recently heard of larger VC firms quietly (secretly) buying tech publications lately. There's a lot of value in the eyeballs -- perhaps also the narrative.
petercooper 5y ago
This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for the right multiple.. :-D). Consider Hubspot buying The Hustle, Robinhood buying MarketSnacks, Stripe's various acquisitions (like IndieHackers), Insight Partners bought The New Stack.. and this is all happening in the developer space too. Subscription based companies with high cashflow but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because, frankly, the owners of the latter are generally quite happy with "modest" (<$40m, say) exits that the former can easily cover.
- senko 5y ago
  As a (casual) reader of several of the newsletters you maintain: Peter, hang in there, don't sell! :-D For those who are not familiar (if that's possible), check out https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/ To your (& Balaji's) point - one of tried and true methods of customer acquisition for SaaS is content marketing, but it's a very long game and you need to have quality content. Acquiring a blog or a media company that already has that has clear ROI. DO already has a solid knowledge base of articles ("How to ... on Ubuntu Server" almost always leads to DO) but mostly for the back-end part of the stack. From that perspective, buying CSS-Tricks is not too surprising.
  - petercooper 5y ago
    Haha, thanks! I've had a few serious acquisition conversations over the years, but it's never made sense because I enjoy what I do already and don't really want to move on to something else :-) Like many people, I would take "retire forever" money (and probably end up still working anyway) but that hasn't been on offer.
    - 5y ago
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of the 2000's and 2010's is behind us, as witnessed by css-tricks's forum with contributions from other world-class experts having closed down last year or so. Could be worse than DO for sure.
- throwra620 5y ago
- reflectiv 5y ago
  Yea... DO has some really great documentation for their services so I am hopeful they will only enhance/make-better css-tricks.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    When looking up how to do something on my EC2 instance, I often find a DO writeup that is better written than the AWS docs. Obviously, this is for generic Linux sysadmin type stuff, and nothing specific to cloud vendor stuff. If a DO link is returned in my search, I tend to click on it.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Are there any similar websites but for web development in general (not just CSS)? Because this one is amazing! The insane amount of SEO spam articles you get whenever you look for guides/examples on Google makes it almost impossible to rely on just searching on Google when you need it. So I'm finding myself having to go back to looking for curated lists of quality websites...
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    MDN is pretty good. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
plexiglas 5y ago
What is DigitalOcean's strategy here? Kudos to CSS-Tricks on the acquisition!
- ru552 5y ago
  They can sprinkle some tasteful adverts on the Flexbox article and make their money back in < 03 years.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  as other comments have pointed out, DO have a strategy of writing great documentation, for stuff that isn't immediately there's (e.g. iptables/ufw, terrafrom, docker etc), these benefit people both using their platform already, and draw others in (find docs, hey these are useful, what else do they do?). I could see them using this for both subtle (the header/footer links etc) and more "sponsered" content (i.e. links to DO AppPlatform in an article/tutorial about next.js etc)
worldmerge 5y ago
Congratulations, I love css tricks. Your articles helped me out a ton.
cphoover 5y ago
Well done! Has been an invaluable resource for front-end web development for at least a decade.
jppope 5y ago
Css-Tricks is an amazing site and its awesome that Chris and digital ocean were able to come together on this. Congrats to chris and their team
Matsta 5y ago
It's already been mentioned in a few comments, but I imagine a big part of this purchase was influenced by the SEO power of the domain. CSS-Trick is a crazy powerful domain [1] Google loves old domains with authority, and still, to this day, it's a lot easier to rank a site built on an aged/expired domain than it is on a fresh domain. Buying powerful domains on auction sites has shot through the roof in the last couple of years. Here's a couple of example on Godaddy (Godaddy auctions tend to have the most powerful domains SEO-wise) https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405463 https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405... https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-414369081 https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-... I imagine they will eventually 301 the domain to the main DigitalOcean domain. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9 https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9
nkrisc 5y ago
Congratulations to them. I’ve always respected css-tricks for their sensible approach to online advertising: no malware distributing ad networks, just selling ad spots to companies that the audience of a css and web dev focused website might be interested in.
TIPSIO 5y ago
For your start up, a good blog could be a serious lead vehicle. To generate a ton of traffic or be worth something, I find you need to balance three things (personal opinion): - Normal longer Blog type articles / announcements - Quick blog / library / resource / how-tos - Engagement / community Each are unique for everyone. For example, Cloudflare I would argue leans heavy to the longer blog rolls and is a lead gen for enterprise reads, investors, and also new hire folks. For SEO though, Digital Ocean cares more about the library of resources style (I would wager). It’s why they are buying CSS-Tricks to get all that “smooth scroll css” traffic. This is very much a traffic is traffic mentality to boost their own blog traffic metrics. There are probably other factors here like community / clout. Why build all this when you can just buy it? Then finally the last one is engagement. This is what converts and is having an active community. This is why influencers can make serious buck. This is the hardest to build and I would argue the most important. A “real following”. Would love to hear your thoughts on this too and how you use your blog for your start up or business.
datavirtue 5y ago
Last week I started poking around in some serious CSS again for the first time in ten years. I was a little rusty. CSS-Tricks definitely stood out for the quality. Truly helpful. I'm back in the swing of things now.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
Congrats! I've referenced the site for my entire programing life and really like it a lot, but other than that I don't have much background on how it came to be. Does anyone know if Chris ever wrote about his motivations for or history of the site?
technotarek 5y ago
Does this include CodePen? If so, DO if you’re listening, please give your current customers a break on the paid versions :)
- riffic 5y ago
  CodePen still seems to be run as an independent company if I'm not mistaken. I wouldn't be surprised to see it start pivoting to look like the Cloud9 IDE (or Fog Creek's Glitch) of DigitalOcean, though.
mamoriamohit 5y ago
CSS Tricks played a critical part in teaching me about web designs. It was a paradise for an introvert like me to hangout at, and also learn new skills. Congratulations, Chris!
kizer 5y ago
Thank you for all the tricks you've supplied me over the years. Here's to many more.
TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
>> Will you still be running CSS-Tricks? > [no] Shame. Thanks for all the help over the years Chris!
rezmason 5y ago
Oh god, I mixed up DigitalOcean and OpenSea when I read this. Had a rough couple of minutes there.
awill 5y ago
I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here. They're obviously. not going after the main cloud players, but it seems strange that they're targeting consumers directly. They spent a lot of time/money crowdsourcing documentation for things that weren't cloud-specific, like patching wordpress, installing apache etc, and now CSS-Tricks. Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?
- kosasbest 5y ago
  > I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here DO is loved by developers, and so is CSS Tricks. DO bought it because of the cozy relationship CSS Tricks has with developers and vice-versa.
- freedomben 5y ago
  DO recently rolled out their "App Platform" which is targeted at developers who don't know much infra/devops. I would guess promoting that is what drove this decision since CSS Tricks has such a good name/reputation with the exact target market. Ads (especially subtle ads) placed on CSS Tricks would be worth a fortune. But even still, I'm mainly an infra/devops/backend guy who occasionally needs to hack on front end, and I've ended up at CSS Tricks a number of times. So it's probably a great buy if used as an advertising hole and to boost SEO credibility.
riazrizvi 5y ago
Does this mean that DigitalOcean has become another platform company that is monitoring their customers’ business performance for possible acquisition? If so beware.
- omarhaneef 5y ago
  Why beware? If you're not forced to sell and they offer you an option, it seems like a net benefit.
  - riazrizvi 5y ago
    Because your bargaining position is weak, and how do you know your data isn’t being used to help some competitor that is part owned by the platform company.
- detaro 5y ago
  it wasn't even hosted on DigitalOcean...
  - riazrizvi 5y ago
    Yeah I guess the acquisition strategy example here is that DigitalOcean is probably monitoring what services their customers that have inflections in traction. Customers won’t care if web services are not their core service. Web service providers can’t really do much about it.
ravenstine 5y ago
CSS Tricks was the biggest help back when I was first teaching myself proper web design and then doing freelance web development back in my early days. Chris Coyier and Ryan Bates (of Railscasts) alone taught me 80+% of what I needed to know to get my start in the industry.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? It's kind of weird. They don't need to become some big dev article repository/media engine. Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services (good as they may be). Happy for Chris and the team to get something (substantial?) back for their efforts and maybe free up their time, but having these openweb resources just be sucked up constantly by 'media conglomerate' strategies isn't the best feeling vs independent/somewhat isolated resources.
- alx__ 5y ago
  More content allows you to increase your rankings in search results. Especially if you become an "authority" for a topic. More views to content pages gets you a chance to promote your products better than search results alone.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  It's a shortcut for content marketing. I would expect a large number of articles over the next few months about launching projects on DO infra. Not a terrible way to get more eyeballs on your product, but if they push things too hard, eventually the site could lose some of it's appeal as a "neutral" source. Historically, CSS-Tricks has raked in a TON of money from affiliate sales to entry level hosting providers (MediaTemple sticks out in my mind). Imagine all of those affiliate sales now going to Digital Ocean instead. There's potential for a massive ROI if DO can responsibly manage the site and funnel over the next decade.
- conductr 5y ago
  > Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? > Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services Because CAC are high and LTV can always be higher
merlinscholz 5y ago
I’m sad to see Chris step down from CSS Tricks, loved his designs, content moderation and writing style. I don’t know if I trust DO as his „successor“, I’ve lost way too much money on their platform for me to consider them trustworthy. And that’s coming from a person who now uses Oracle Cloud.
jpswade 5y ago
I never expected a web host would buy a content farm, let alone one about a subject that, let’s face it doesn’t directly depend on one.
cssrider 5y ago
All these years, I thought it was a site for community. Dang, TIL, it was a business. We will miss you CSS-Tricks.
- bdlowery 5y ago
  Did you miss the giant frontend masters sidebar sticky on the side of every article for the past 2+ years? Chris was making tens of thousands off that ad each month.
daqhris 5y ago
What a wonderful feat! So many years of inspiring new developers... turned into the best exit for its founder. Congrats!
CommanderData 5y ago
This reminds me of a little known fact that Digital Ocean almost had their own UI kit, I posted a question on HN 5 years ago asking if anyone had used it. It was called Buoy. It was actually very nice for it's time, I wonder if anyone from DO remembers this. Edit: See http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html

825 points by nilsandrey 5y ago

I've been using the CSS-Tricks site since 2008. It's one of the best sites on internet and has great community of developers. Congrats to Chris Coyier and the team!

lelandfe 5y ago

I’ll be the first to say: congrats to Chris! Just an excellent guy - and he’s been contributing so much good writing to the web development community for so long, he deserves a pay day.

bilekas 5y ago

Does seem a bit of a strange fit for DigitalOcean. That said, they seem like a solid company and they really do have some really good tutorials/knowledgebase. Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.

azemetre 5y ago
Not that strange. DigitalOcean has (or had?) a great forum for asking tech questions on setting up droplets and other DO services. It was very community driven. I relied on it often when I first made my VPS back in 2013.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  Yeah their docs have always been top notch. Couldn't have found a better home IMO.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
They did buy launchaco, maybe their move is "build your stuff and host it on our stuff"
- jasongill 5y ago
  Launchaco got bought by Namecheap
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    I'm not sure what I was thinking when I typed that.
XCSme 5y ago
Well, CSS-tricks is used by web developers. Web developers are a big slice of DO's target market, as they usually need servers/hosting.

gotts 5y ago

Good for CSS-Tricks team but Why does DigitalOcean need it in the first place? Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?

gzer0 5y ago
DO has really been expanding their SEO in terms of the generic "How to install X on Ubuntu" search term (albeit, this is particular for CSS-tricks). I often see them ranked near the top for many of these searches. I think it's a great addition if that's what DO is going for.
lelandfe 5y ago
DigitalOcean writes a ton of tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
- libertine 5y ago
  >Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see. I think they shouldn't touch it and let CSS-Tricks continue to do their own thing.
- Matsta 5y ago
  I imagine they'll put links into their strongest pages and then eventually 301 the domain. In a comment above they mentioned DO has also acquired Scotch. io and that 301s to DO now.
rozenmd 5y ago
Being a media company that happens to sell SaaS subscriptions is becoming a popular way to solve the traction problem.
electric_muse 5y ago
I've spent some time with Digital Ocean team members, and they're dead-set on having the best technical content on the internet. It's been a core to their growth strategy so far: - Target long-tail searches -- queries where there may not be a lot of volume but also not a lot of competition - Stand out with very good content (not just SEO filler) - Build trust with the dev community This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy. So acquiring large tranches like this makes sense.

smashah 5y ago

Congrats!

ramesh31 5y ago

I (and I'm sure many others here) owe my career to Chris. HTML never "clicked" for me, until I watched one of his screencasts breaking down a design and building a page from scratch. The rest is history.

ElectronShak 5y ago

Whether it be setting up a LAMP stack on a server, securing nginx with Lets Encrypt, deploying a python ML model as a web service, you name it, DigitalOcean's tutorials just work. Thanks Digital Ocean! PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.

skilled 5y ago
I've been a DO customer since 2013 and never in that time have I hosted any of my sites or apps on other platforms. They're super good in every department; support, pricing, tools, and of course, tutorials. Only a shame they rolled out all the affiliate credits. In the first year I generated like $1,500 in affiliate revenue from a single review post I did. At the rate of $5 per droplet, that's 25 years worth of hosting. I didn't get the full 25 but still happy to pay for their services.
- huehehue 5y ago
  Big fan of DO. I have a Droplet I haven't accessed in 7 years. I'm pretty sure if I look at it the wrong way it will break, but it's been running the same app with no downtime like a champ.
- npsimons 5y ago
  Honestly, as another satisfied customer, I jumped on the opportunity to buy some of their stock. I believe it's a solid investment.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I agree DO is good in pricing, tools, and tutorials. But support? I've had terrible experiences with DO support, enough so that I fled to a different provider. Maybe they're improving, but DO tends to drop the account lock hammer quickly on first sign of any anomaly that the algorithm doesn't like, rendering the victim helpless and relegated to groveling and begging for compassion. One can hope that a tweet gets picked up by HN or other media to get their attention, but alas, such is not typical.

skilled 5y ago

Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris. Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there. Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[2]. Absolute genius. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digitalocean https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digit... [1]: https://twitter.com/chris__sev https://twitter.com/chris__sev [2]: https://www.better.dev/ https://www.better.dev/

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
[flagged]
- skilled 5y ago
  I'm guessing that is what happened. Maybe it was a clause in the contract? If Chris reads this comment maybe he can chime in to clarify. I should have made that clear in my original comment, though. I found out about it by doing keyword research for a piece I was doing. Better.dev was one of the sites that ranked extremely well for it and I hadn't heard of the name before. Upon closer inspection, I learned that the post is an old Scotch.io article which is being redirected to his new project.
  - Matsta 5y ago
    Scotch.io redirects to Digital Ocean Community site when I checked just now. I imagine a big reason it was acquired for the sweet domain authority for SEO. You can see that Scotch.io was dying off in traffic [1] - I would assume it wasn't getting new content regularly enough. The domain is pretty powerful, so even pushing some traffic to Better.dev [2] via 301's would have helped both sites out. I imagine better.dev would have agreed to promote DO and put some links on their top pages to give the DigitalOcean domain even more SEO power. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa [2] - https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt

seanw444 5y ago

This is one of the few instances where I can say I trust the acquiring company. I've been a fan of DigitalOcean since I started using them. They haven't given me a reason to dislike them. And like the post says, they do write some handy tutorials. One that's helped me a few times is how to spin up a quick FTP server on Debian, because for some reason I can never configure it right. Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.

michaelcampbell 5y ago
I'm a digo customer, but even if I weren't I'd still be using a lot of their online documentation.

helipad 5y ago

All frontend developers: keep the Flexbox article alive please.

PaulBGD_ 5y ago
I would love to see what % of their visits is the flexbox article.
- skilled 5y ago
  I bet it is in the millions. I help manage some sites which have CSS tutorials on them, and even if the article is about something like "How to use the CSS counter() property" - if you have the words "center" and "div" mentioned in the article, Google Search Console will report impressions for that article with keywords like "how to center a div". Funny!
- arvinsim 5y ago
  That and the grids article are probably the most used bookmarked articles I have perused.
- for1nner 5y ago
  Well at least 50% of that % is me forgetting which is justify-content and which is align-items... Words are hard
- swyx 5y ago
  7.6% this number is public: https://css-tricks.com/thank-you-2021-edition/ https://css-tricks.com/thank-you-2021-edition/ total traffic 88m, flexbox is 6.7m of that. speaks to their deep bench tbh.
jostylr 5y ago
Their guides are indispensable for my occasional dabbling. Just saved flexbox and grid guides using the SingleFile extension, something I discovered a couple of weeks ago here on HN. HN warns and provides solutions. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

bjarneh 5y ago

> You can build anything on DigitalOcean I was almost expecting that text to be a link to zombo.com

Jerrrry 5y ago

Let's go!!!! Congratulations Chris. Me and others owe our careers in webdev and our CSS sourcery magic to your great articles.

mxuribe 5y ago

Congrats to the CSS-Tricks team!

electric_muse 5y ago

I've also recently heard of larger VC firms quietly (secretly) buying tech publications lately. There's a lot of value in the eyeballs -- perhaps also the narrative.

petercooper 5y ago

This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for the right multiple.. :-D). Consider Hubspot buying The Hustle, Robinhood buying MarketSnacks, Stripe's various acquisitions (like IndieHackers), Insight Partners bought The New Stack.. and this is all happening in the developer space too. Subscription based companies with high cashflow but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because, frankly, the owners of the latter are generally quite happy with "modest" (<$40m, say) exits that the former can easily cover.

senko 5y ago
As a (casual) reader of several of the newsletters you maintain: Peter, hang in there, don't sell! :-D For those who are not familiar (if that's possible), check out https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/ To your (& Balaji's) point - one of tried and true methods of customer acquisition for SaaS is content marketing, but it's a very long game and you need to have quality content. Acquiring a blog or a media company that already has that has clear ROI. DO already has a solid knowledge base of articles ("How to ... on Ubuntu Server" almost always leads to DO) but mostly for the back-end part of the stack. From that perspective, buying CSS-Tricks is not too surprising.
- petercooper 5y ago
  Haha, thanks! I've had a few serious acquisition conversations over the years, but it's never made sense because I enjoy what I do already and don't really want to move on to something else :-) Like many people, I would take "retire forever" money (and probably end up still working anyway) but that hasn't been on offer.
  - 5y ago

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of the 2000's and 2010's is behind us, as witnessed by css-tricks's forum with contributions from other world-class experts having closed down last year or so. Could be worse than DO for sure.

throwra620 5y ago
reflectiv 5y ago
Yea... DO has some really great documentation for their services so I am hopeful they will only enhance/make-better css-tricks.
- dylan604 5y ago
  When looking up how to do something on my EC2 instance, I often find a DO writeup that is better written than the AWS docs. Obviously, this is for generic Linux sysadmin type stuff, and nothing specific to cloud vendor stuff. If a DO link is returned in my search, I tend to click on it.
mardifoufs 5y ago
Are there any similar websites but for web development in general (not just CSS)? Because this one is amazing! The insane amount of SEO spam articles you get whenever you look for guides/examples on Google makes it almost impossible to rely on just searching on Google when you need it. So I'm finding myself having to go back to looking for curated lists of quality websites...
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  MDN is pretty good. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

plexiglas 5y ago

What is DigitalOcean's strategy here? Kudos to CSS-Tricks on the acquisition!

ru552 5y ago
They can sprinkle some tasteful adverts on the Flexbox article and make their money back in < 03 years.
tehbeard 5y ago
as other comments have pointed out, DO have a strategy of writing great documentation, for stuff that isn't immediately there's (e.g. iptables/ufw, terrafrom, docker etc), these benefit people both using their platform already, and draw others in (find docs, hey these are useful, what else do they do?). I could see them using this for both subtle (the header/footer links etc) and more "sponsered" content (i.e. links to DO AppPlatform in an article/tutorial about next.js etc)

worldmerge 5y ago

Congratulations, I love css tricks. Your articles helped me out a ton.

cphoover 5y ago

Well done! Has been an invaluable resource for front-end web development for at least a decade.

jppope 5y ago

Css-Tricks is an amazing site and its awesome that Chris and digital ocean were able to come together on this. Congrats to chris and their team

Matsta 5y ago

It's already been mentioned in a few comments, but I imagine a big part of this purchase was influenced by the SEO power of the domain. CSS-Trick is a crazy powerful domain [1] Google loves old domains with authority, and still, to this day, it's a lot easier to rank a site built on an aged/expired domain than it is on a fresh domain. Buying powerful domains on auction sites has shot through the roof in the last couple of years. Here's a couple of example on Godaddy (Godaddy auctions tend to have the most powerful domains SEO-wise) https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405463 https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405... https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-414369081 https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-... I imagine they will eventually 301 the domain to the main DigitalOcean domain. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9 https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9

nkrisc 5y ago

Congratulations to them. I’ve always respected css-tricks for their sensible approach to online advertising: no malware distributing ad networks, just selling ad spots to companies that the audience of a css and web dev focused website might be interested in.

TIPSIO 5y ago

For your start up, a good blog could be a serious lead vehicle. To generate a ton of traffic or be worth something, I find you need to balance three things (personal opinion): - Normal longer Blog type articles / announcements - Quick blog / library / resource / how-tos - Engagement / community Each are unique for everyone. For example, Cloudflare I would argue leans heavy to the longer blog rolls and is a lead gen for enterprise reads, investors, and also new hire folks. For SEO though, Digital Ocean cares more about the library of resources style (I would wager). It’s why they are buying CSS-Tricks to get all that “smooth scroll css” traffic. This is very much a traffic is traffic mentality to boost their own blog traffic metrics. There are probably other factors here like community / clout. Why build all this when you can just buy it? Then finally the last one is engagement. This is what converts and is having an active community. This is why influencers can make serious buck. This is the hardest to build and I would argue the most important. A “real following”. Would love to hear your thoughts on this too and how you use your blog for your start up or business.

datavirtue 5y ago

Last week I started poking around in some serious CSS again for the first time in ten years. I was a little rusty. CSS-Tricks definitely stood out for the quality. Truly helpful. I'm back in the swing of things now.

PascLeRasc 5y ago

Congrats! I've referenced the site for my entire programing life and really like it a lot, but other than that I don't have much background on how it came to be. Does anyone know if Chris ever wrote about his motivations for or history of the site?

technotarek 5y ago

Does this include CodePen? If so, DO if you’re listening, please give your current customers a break on the paid versions :)

riffic 5y ago
CodePen still seems to be run as an independent company if I'm not mistaken. I wouldn't be surprised to see it start pivoting to look like the Cloud9 IDE (or Fog Creek's Glitch) of DigitalOcean, though.

mamoriamohit 5y ago

CSS Tricks played a critical part in teaching me about web designs. It was a paradise for an introvert like me to hangout at, and also learn new skills. Congratulations, Chris!

kizer 5y ago

Thank you for all the tricks you've supplied me over the years. Here's to many more.

TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago

>> Will you still be running CSS-Tricks? > [no] Shame. Thanks for all the help over the years Chris!

rezmason 5y ago

Oh god, I mixed up DigitalOcean and OpenSea when I read this. Had a rough couple of minutes there.

awill 5y ago

I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here. They're obviously. not going after the main cloud players, but it seems strange that they're targeting consumers directly. They spent a lot of time/money crowdsourcing documentation for things that weren't cloud-specific, like patching wordpress, installing apache etc, and now CSS-Tricks. Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?

kosasbest 5y ago
> I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here DO is loved by developers, and so is CSS Tricks. DO bought it because of the cozy relationship CSS Tricks has with developers and vice-versa.
freedomben 5y ago
DO recently rolled out their "App Platform" which is targeted at developers who don't know much infra/devops. I would guess promoting that is what drove this decision since CSS Tricks has such a good name/reputation with the exact target market. Ads (especially subtle ads) placed on CSS Tricks would be worth a fortune. But even still, I'm mainly an infra/devops/backend guy who occasionally needs to hack on front end, and I've ended up at CSS Tricks a number of times. So it's probably a great buy if used as an advertising hole and to boost SEO credibility.

riazrizvi 5y ago

Does this mean that DigitalOcean has become another platform company that is monitoring their customers’ business performance for possible acquisition? If so beware.

omarhaneef 5y ago
Why beware? If you're not forced to sell and they offer you an option, it seems like a net benefit.
- riazrizvi 5y ago
  Because your bargaining position is weak, and how do you know your data isn’t being used to help some competitor that is part owned by the platform company.
detaro 5y ago
it wasn't even hosted on DigitalOcean...
- riazrizvi 5y ago
  Yeah I guess the acquisition strategy example here is that DigitalOcean is probably monitoring what services their customers that have inflections in traction. Customers won’t care if web services are not their core service. Web service providers can’t really do much about it.

ravenstine 5y ago

CSS Tricks was the biggest help back when I was first teaching myself proper web design and then doing freelance web development back in my early days. Chris Coyier and Ryan Bates (of Railscasts) alone taught me 80+% of what I needed to know to get my start in the industry.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? It's kind of weird. They don't need to become some big dev article repository/media engine. Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services (good as they may be). Happy for Chris and the team to get something (substantial?) back for their efforts and maybe free up their time, but having these openweb resources just be sucked up constantly by 'media conglomerate' strategies isn't the best feeling vs independent/somewhat isolated resources.

alx__ 5y ago
More content allows you to increase your rankings in search results. Especially if you become an "authority" for a topic. More views to content pages gets you a chance to promote your products better than search results alone.
yurishimo 5y ago
It's a shortcut for content marketing. I would expect a large number of articles over the next few months about launching projects on DO infra. Not a terrible way to get more eyeballs on your product, but if they push things too hard, eventually the site could lose some of it's appeal as a "neutral" source. Historically, CSS-Tricks has raked in a TON of money from affiliate sales to entry level hosting providers (MediaTemple sticks out in my mind). Imagine all of those affiliate sales now going to Digital Ocean instead. There's potential for a massive ROI if DO can responsibly manage the site and funnel over the next decade.
conductr 5y ago
> Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? > Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services Because CAC are high and LTV can always be higher

merlinscholz 5y ago

I’m sad to see Chris step down from CSS Tricks, loved his designs, content moderation and writing style. I don’t know if I trust DO as his „successor“, I’ve lost way too much money on their platform for me to consider them trustworthy. And that’s coming from a person who now uses Oracle Cloud.

jpswade 5y ago

I never expected a web host would buy a content farm, let alone one about a subject that, let’s face it doesn’t directly depend on one.

cssrider 5y ago

All these years, I thought it was a site for community. Dang, TIL, it was a business. We will miss you CSS-Tricks.

bdlowery 5y ago
Did you miss the giant frontend masters sidebar sticky on the side of every article for the past 2+ years? Chris was making tens of thousands off that ad each month.

daqhris 5y ago

What a wonderful feat! So many years of inspiring new developers... turned into the best exit for its founder. Congrats!

CommanderData 5y ago

This reminds me of a little known fact that Digital Ocean almost had their own UI kit, I posted a question on HN 5 years ago asking if anyone had used it. It was called Buoy. It was actually very nice for it's time, I wonder if anyone from DO remembers this. Edit: See http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html