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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.

by tjpnz 4y ago

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.

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.

by 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.