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Sorry to hear that! Curious what you think of DO now? I've always loved DO but I've found it REALLY hard to recommend we us it at work

hotpotamus 4y ago
I mean, I don't want this to be the "kicking them while they're down thread", but I always wondered how a little guy is supposed to compete with AWS. I say that as someone who was there firsthand to watch Rackspace get crushed by them.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  IMO what DO had going for them was simplicity. If I was in the market for a no-nonsense VPS I could see myself going with them over AWS.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    AWS actually offers their own version of that with Lightsail and can build on their own primitives to deliver it. It's one of many reasons why they seem so formidable to me.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I have now, twice, with a distance of a decade between the experiences, seen a VPS provider's simplicity and ability to easily scale stop mattering at high-ish but not extremely high levels of traffic—in both cases, because their network couldn't keep up with traffic, such that we were finding ourselves network-bound even on pretty weak VMs, everywhere. Apparently poor inter-connects or peering agreements or something (not sure) leading to consistently terrible performance for people in some regions, heavier public traffic hitting a wall long before a smallish VM was starting to sweat, that kind of thing. First time it was Rackspace, second time it was DO. First time we fixed it by leasing bare metal somewhere (I forget where) and running our own libvirt/KVM VMs, second time we fixed it by switching to AWS. In both cases, that fixed all the network issues. AWS has a separate problem that they have these vague classifications for network quality and it's hard (at least, it was for us) to feel certain the network was the problem, but at least it's not that hard to spin up a VM with a better-rated network to trial-and-error one's way to the right setting.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    DigitalOcean hasn't been price-competitive in the VPS and baremetal server market in which there are quite literally hundreds if not thousands of players, most of whom offer better value than DO. DO is in a weird place - not as popular or feature-rich as the big clouds, but also not price-efficient enough to compete in the extremely price-sensitive VPS and baremetal market. I wonder what kind of startup decides on DO as their infra provider of choice.
- xeromal 4y ago
  I use DO and AWS and I use DO when I want to guarantee my shit is gonna cost $5 a month.
- azemetre 4y ago
  While I'm not an enterprise customer, I can tell you why I choose Digital Ocean (and have been using them for the last 10 years). They allow me to put a fixed amount of money in a fund that they charge me from. I will never get any "surprise fees" this way. They don't have my credit card so it will just drain my funds until they delete my services, which is extremely ok by me. My major fear of paying for things like AWS or Google business/cloud tools is the fear of getting my account locked up/banned because I want to dispute a charge that isn't fair. I've slowly been decoupling my accounts away from Google (banking, healthcare, etc) but it's very hard. Their moat is extremely deep.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I mean, I don't want this to be the "kicking them while they're down thread", but I always wondered how a little guy is supposed to compete with AWS. I say that as someone who was there firsthand to watch Rackspace get crushed by them.

tjpnz 4y ago
IMO what DO had going for them was simplicity. If I was in the market for a no-nonsense VPS I could see myself going with them over AWS.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  AWS actually offers their own version of that with Lightsail and can build on their own primitives to deliver it. It's one of many reasons why they seem so formidable to me.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I have now, twice, with a distance of a decade between the experiences, seen a VPS provider's simplicity and ability to easily scale stop mattering at high-ish but not extremely high levels of traffic—in both cases, because their network couldn't keep up with traffic, such that we were finding ourselves network-bound even on pretty weak VMs, everywhere. Apparently poor inter-connects or peering agreements or something (not sure) leading to consistently terrible performance for people in some regions, heavier public traffic hitting a wall long before a smallish VM was starting to sweat, that kind of thing. First time it was Rackspace, second time it was DO. First time we fixed it by leasing bare metal somewhere (I forget where) and running our own libvirt/KVM VMs, second time we fixed it by switching to AWS. In both cases, that fixed all the network issues. AWS has a separate problem that they have these vague classifications for network quality and it's hard (at least, it was for us) to feel certain the network was the problem, but at least it's not that hard to spin up a VM with a better-rated network to trial-and-error one's way to the right setting.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  DigitalOcean hasn't been price-competitive in the VPS and baremetal server market in which there are quite literally hundreds if not thousands of players, most of whom offer better value than DO. DO is in a weird place - not as popular or feature-rich as the big clouds, but also not price-efficient enough to compete in the extremely price-sensitive VPS and baremetal market. I wonder what kind of startup decides on DO as their infra provider of choice.
xeromal 4y ago
I use DO and AWS and I use DO when I want to guarantee my shit is gonna cost $5 a month.
azemetre 4y ago
While I'm not an enterprise customer, I can tell you why I choose Digital Ocean (and have been using them for the last 10 years). They allow me to put a fixed amount of money in a fund that they charge me from. I will never get any "surprise fees" this way. They don't have my credit card so it will just drain my funds until they delete my services, which is extremely ok by me. My major fear of paying for things like AWS or Google business/cloud tools is the fear of getting my account locked up/banned because I want to dispute a charge that isn't fair. I've slowly been decoupling my accounts away from Google (banking, healthcare, etc) but it's very hard. Their moat is extremely deep.